Patchwerk Revisited

Monday night and for the first time in a few weeks we had the numbers to complete a 2 night clean sweep of Naxx 25. Last night was just the Construct wing and the two Mr Bigs, it was also a night of god awful lag, never ever lagged so badly. Guessing every player and their dog where in Naxx before the weekly reset. A very mixed bad of results to be fair, 3rd on Grobbulus, 5Th on Gluth, a very special 2nd on KT and 5th (see above) on the Patchwerk. Patchwerk was especially pleasing as I added an extra 200dps over last attempt....may not have been the best, but I did my best. I did completely fuck up my rotation twice and ended up with Wrath eclipse which kept bouncing off the GCD, so there is definitely room for improvement. One month and we will break the 5k target , for sure.

Thadius, Thadius, Thadius though, that's a different story altogether. We had an absolute shocker (excuse the pun). Don't know if it was the lag, murderous guildies, suicidal me or simply a bad, bad day at the office...we sucked, we blew....we blucked. Apparently then, I now bluck on two bosses, Thaddy-poos and Heigan. We see a trend. If we have to move, we die. We dance like our Dad. Not good news with Ulduar around the corner.

Wednesday, After The Wishlist

As the commentator (many thanks for taking the time to comment) on yesterday's post pointed out, perhaps my wish list was a little ambitious. We barely scraped a 25 man team together, for the third week running and a few were either undergeared or inexperienced. That made for a scrappy night but hopefully it will help the guild in the long term. There seems to be a malaize similar to last summer, when raiding suddenly seemed too much effort for some. I guess it is Ulduar rearing its head and the anticipation of a whole new tier of gear. From my perspective though, we should be hitting Ulduar on day one kitted out in best in slot, not simply 4 pieces of T7 and some fill ins. We are a "casual raiding guild" but that does not mean we should raid casually (i prefer the term hardcore social guild anyhow).

I did not get any of the phat lootz that I was after, not even a moldy old limb. The only item to drop of any interest was the precious, tasty mage tears. /hug

Being a techno-tard, I haven't worked out to take a decent screen shot whilst at my home office, as I have two screens and it is baffling me.Any answers would be very gratefully recieved.

Patchwerk- Did not break 4.5k but did manage 4.38k which is a whole lot of happiness more than last week. We one shotted him, and the Boomdaddy came in 3rd, behind two warlocks as usual. The RNG was not at all kind and and I had to Wrath for what seemed like 30 seconds to get my first eclipse proc. Had fate and Blizzard been kinder, 4.5k would have got smished into tiny pieces, I think.We will break 5k before Ulduar , if it kills us.

Grob of green farts went down first time two, as he should, and we are pleased to have topped the chart on a boss for the first time in far too long.Yay for Boomkin. Gluth was a struggle but we still managed a very respectable second spot on the dps chart when he finally went to the puppy dog pound in the sky.

It was ironic that on a poor nights performance, the Boomdaddy had 3 of our best boss kill results.

Naughty BoomBashers Naughty Boomkins

As always this morning, I had a quick troll through the various sites I have linked to this blog. I was somewhat astounded by what I found as it shook my dangly,feathery bits for a moment. I had an initial pappa Boomdaddy feeling, then some anger and then some sadness. The offending article was posted on the blog of the ever lovely Egotistical Priest by one of her minions about Boomkins of all things. Now if it had been a rant about Magetards, that would be both acceptable and understandable, but to stab at the heart of the Boomkin establishment simply isn't cricket, old chap. The Boomdaddy played nice and kept his toys in his pram but it has spurred me to think about what the original poster said and why we need to listen and pay credence.

The basic gist if you haven't clicked on the link and read it, is a scenario where the balance specced druid (careful use or wording there, did ya notice?) has pulled almighty agro with starfall and presumably hurricane. The poster priest has to shield him/her in order to stop them becoming road kill, the tank struggles to regain aggro and the artist formerly known as a Boomkin, typhoons the mobs away, leaving the poor tank to scuttle after them and try somehow to regain aggro.

Ok wings up, all Boomkins have done this at least once in their careers. You know what though?, we did it as a laugh on the friday- night- bit pissed on cheap wine- instance runs with guildies. We have done it for comic effect to annoy our lovely feral tank and grumpy shaman guild leader. We have done it in runs through ZG, nuking the bejesus out of low level mobs in a retarded AoE contest with locks and Magetards. Ok, so read all the above, it was done a handful of times for shit and giggles.

If you are a Boomkin that does this kind of thing in PuG's, instances and raids, then the Boomdaddy's Eye of Mordor is on you. You are an embarrassment and a disgrace. Stripped of the Boomkin title, you will walk the street of shame being known as "just a balance spec druid". Mages and Locks pull this kind of shit trying to be top of the pops, we do not.

We remember what it was like in TBC when we were aggro magnets and how we couldn't put out the damage of dps clasess. We remember being told by a raiding guild that the only use for a Boomkin was on a BBQ and was told to respec.../gquit.We learnt the rules of aggro, we learned spell rotation, we tried to assemble workable kit (despite of Blizzard). Of course we want to do as high a damage level of possible, thats part of our job in a raid...part of, remember that. We rez, we cross heal and sometimes if you are really cute or have a sexy teamspeak voice we may even give you our innervate juice. Dps is the thing we do when not holding the raid together.

Do not act the bollocks and get us bad raid rep, do not undo a lot of hard work by a lot of decent Boomkin players. Get your Omen threat meter. Analyze your spec and rotations, learn the consequences of your actions. Typhoon should not be taken out of your bag of tricks in a raid unless it is to get mobs of the healer in an emergency, The list of times when Starfall should realistically be used in end game WoTLK raiding is thinner than a hungry stick insect. That's why I call it an AK47 in the hands of a toddler, bad things tend to happen if you are not smart.

So what has gone wrong? Why are there some "balance specced druids" out there causing a kerfuffle. Lets look at the Boomkin timeline.

Early TBC

Lets face it we were pretty crap. Gear was mostly pvp or paint explosion mismatch of cloth and leather. Even specced for threat reduction we pulled more than Brad Pitt in a singles and divorced club. We were the poster child for Lynx deodorant. Half the time we were waiting for the Omen bong bong bong noise to go away. Raid guilds used us as target dummies for melon throwing practice.

Middle TBC

Things seemed to get better. Broader minded raid guilds started to pick up a few Boomkins and we became a steady raid members. Our reasonable dps, raid utility and buffs were finally considered raid worthy. Top 5 dps places were pretty standard.

Late TBC

As with other classes, things got silly. God gave us a viable AoE and crowd control. We nuked the Locks into second place. We were the daddy and the mummy rolled into one. Some people got lazy....that's problem 1.

Early Wrath

Problem 2 emerges with the rise of Wrath. Now that Boomkins were really BOOOOOOMKINS they started appearing everywhere. Every druid I saw seemed to have turned balance to get to 80. Good luck to them and I hope they enjoyed the experience. Some have not gone back to what they were good at though and we appear to have inherited a new tier of Moonkins. Lacking in experience, skill and code. Don't shout... my point is a player could have easily leveled from 70-80 in 3-4 weeks and that is not what I call experienced. Some are great though, of course!

Blizzard is partly to blame for the laziness in all the dps classes. When you can AoE bulldoze your way through NAXX with no real need for crowd control, people will take the easy option. This was one reason why our GM banned us all from AoE'ing mobs in naxx (apart from the obvious AoE groups), people were forgetting how to single target mobs and pulling AoE bullshit all the time.

Conclusion. The lazy nuking druids need to remember the basics and work hard again, the fresh faces need to do their research. In that way the Boomdaddy will not get indigestion from reading BoomBashing on very eminent and well respected blogs, and would get some work done. Where I would never like to read our spec being derided, it is good to hear others views on our class, so we can continue to improve as the highest evolution of druid.

PTR lurve

Courtesy of MMO champion.

Starfall cool down has been lowered from 3 min to 1.5 min.

When you absolutely, positively have to pull/kill every muther fooker in the room.Twice. We like anything that gives us the chance to do more damage but still not totally convinced that starfall has any great use in PVE. Is is a huge mana sink. We do love it in PvP though and will make AOE farming quicker. B+

Eclipse now gives you a 33% chance of increasing damage done by Wrath by 30% (up from 20%) when you critically hit with Starfire.

I will wait to read what the theory-crafting numberkins have to say about this. Does it mean that starfire to proc wrath eclipse will be the new black? Damn I was just getting used to it! I think the pendulum swings back to Starfire proccing Wrath as the highest dps rotation, but without some bimbling about I'm unsure how the changes to natures grace will work. B

Owlkin Frenzy now affects all attacks. (Old - Physical melee and ranged attacks only)

Good to see Blizz have changed their minds again. Enough said. B+ for waking up, Blizz.

Celestial Focus now reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting Starfire, Hibernate and Cyclone by 23/46/70% and increases your total spell haste by 1/2/3%.

Losing the stun will effect PvPr's and leveling Boomkins the most. The stun was practically useless for raiding Moonkins. Think overall it just helps me sleep at night better knowing I have this instead of Owlkin frenzy.


Nature's Grace now increasing your spell casting speed by 20% for 3 sec. (Old - Reduced the casting time of your next spell by 0.5 sec.)

Haven't had any coffee yet but i think this is good news. 3 second duration......guessing haste will become even more important so that you can get off 3 wraths or 2 starfires during the proc.

Faerie Fire and Faerie Fire (Feral) now reduces the armor of the target for 5 min. (Up from 40 sec) Duration remains 40sec in PvP.

Even without coffee, I know this is good news. Little bit of wee, good news. IFF will no longer be a ginger step child spell. 5 mins!!!!! Bloody fantastic! Mana efficiency without pissing about with rotations.5% armour reduction and 3% haste for the raid, additionally 3% crit to us lovelies.Roll up roll up. We like. We like more than that exotic dancer we met in Greece. A+

Insect Swarm: The bonus damage from spellpower on this damage over time ability has been increased significantly to match similar spells on other classes.

Again, this will be one for the brainbox Boomkins to suss out. But it looks like fabulous news for the DoT.A-

I think thats it. All in all some good news. We will just have so see what else comes out of the rinse and whether or not these changes ever make it live.

The missing stats.......

Ho Hum. Well, we knew it was going to be tough to get a top 5 finish with the quality of some of the other dps. Boomdaddy is a tad dissapointed not to break 3k dps across all the bosses but that cant be helped when we are completely useless at Heigan. When i say completely useless that may be an exageration, we do have one use. Designated dead body. For the good of the raid we lie down quietly in order to show everyone where the lava burst come up from. True story. We do also have to admit to being a little pissed for the second half of the raid, as the wine was tasting rather too good. Bad Boomdaddy.

On the good side, we did like 58% crit on wrath and the whopping 79% on starfire. When we finally get the fourth piece of T7, we can add another lovely 5% crit across the board on top of that. Yummy scrummy. With regards to the new spec we think we need a few more raids to see if its any better. Improved faerie fire, is just a pain in the chocolate starfish at the moment, as it screws my rotation to buggery. We will give it a proper go though and see if we can click our way through it.

Naxx 25 second leg is in an hour and i have put 3 sticky notes on my monitors saying "TURN ON COMBATLOG YOU KNOB-END", we shall see if that was subtle enough to get through the Boomdaddy's thick skull.

Patchy Mcpatch 3.1.0

There is alot of buzz around about the ptr and about patch 3.1.0. As usual the list of tweaks and modifications to the Boomkin class is nose-bleedingly long. God knows how blizzard developers get so much thoughtful, incisive and big brain work packed into the half hour on Fridays between their 5th Kryspy Kreme and scratching their balls.

Balance

Owlkin Frenzy is now properly considered an Enrage effect. Now also does not trigger from spell hits, only physical ranged and melee attacks.

Hats off to them. One possible change listed and its a bag of bollocks.Good work fellas.



Owlkin Frenzy
Rank 3
Attacks done to you while in Moonkin form have a 15% chance to cause you to go into a Frenzy, increasing your damage by 10% and causes you to be immune to pushback while casting Balance spells. Lasts 10 sec.

This talent has really always been for the PvP specced Boomkin, as its application in PvE is limited at best. This change however will solidly stick it in PvP only builds for good, if it gets through to the live realms. As Gray pointed out , the only time in Naxx that any Moonkin could benefit from this talent, would be if they consistently stood in the lava AOE during Sartharian. Even then the healers are probably going to be thinking "BBQ chicken on the menu tonight then" if you pull that kind of nonsense.

Are we bothered? Yes and no. No, because we are a raiding Boomster and do not use this talent in our build. Yes ,because it further nerfs balance druids in PvP and as I wrote the other day, things just aint rosey in the Boomkin garden of BG's.

I suspect that they will scrap it before the patch goes live, but only if the developers got sprinkles on the last doughnut. Otherwise their response will be "You have THE dance ffs, what more do you want?".

One other nugget that may have slipped through some druids fish-nets , is this quote by Ghostcrawler regarding mana regen changes in 3.1.

Mana Regeneration changes in 3.1 and effects on Innervate

I don't think it will suddenly make druids regem from Spirit to Int. We'll see.If you mean these changes will nerf Innervate, yes, it will. On live Innervate can be 120% of your bar, say 25,000 mana. Historically it was more like 75% of your bar, and it should be closer to that with these changes.


I'm going to leave this one for a full post on mana regen changes but I'm feeling a little edgy.

BoomMummy reporting

Well, goodness me!

It’s so nice to have you all sitting here waiting for me to speak up at last. I love you all, I really do! I felt so privileged to be asked to contribute to this blog, I almost wet myself and made a mess of my feathers. But that's a story for later!

I have a terrible confession to make –me and the Boomdaddy have a terrible disagreement….. I like crit, and I like it a lot. I like crit more than I should do…. I’m beginning to think that the only thing I can think about is crit. CRIT CRIT CRIT!!! And there in lies our difference, as he is all hung up on hit.

You may think Moonkin are all the same, but that is not true. They can be played in many different ways. Me and the Boomdaddy spar on the damage charts, arguing about the best way to play. We both have very different specs but both push the other dps to their poor little limits. Who are we to decide what’s right? We are just two, lonely Moonkin, crying into our‘please-be-a-back-up-healer’ soup.

Night night, all you young Moonkin, I'll be back soon!

Keep your Feathers Bright! XXX

The Nicest Things

Stormwind, late in the evening doing God knows what. We get a whisper out of the blue which in Stormwind usually means beggars. No but not this time, no sir-ee. It in fact was a brief moment of Moonkin magic.

Grasshopper: hey.

BoomDaddy: err hello......

GH: I'm a druid too.

BD: Good man, good man....but the answer is still no.

GH: No what?

BD: No you cant have any gold.We appreciate you have chosen wisely to become a druid but don't let the side down by begging. That's for lesser classes, like Mages.

GH: Oh. But I don't want money.

BD: That's good then. Nice to have met you then. Cya.

GH: I just wondered if you could help me a minute.

BD: (wracks brains...lvl 17.....sea lion quest) Well I'm a bit busy to do the sea lion quest right now....

GH:I did that. I just wondered how you did that.

BD: Did what?

GH: That.

BD: What??

GH: That thing your doing.

BD: OK mate I'm not sure what I'm"doing"

GH: The BIG thing with horns. It looks cool.

BD: Ooooh Moonkin form. Well, you get to chose what kind of druid you want to be. Healing druids can become trees, feral druids are bear tanks that hit things with their head or sneak around as cats pretending to be rogues. Balance druids go Moonkin. And we call them antlers not horns btw.

GH: What do Moonkin do?

BD: We top the damage charts.

GH: Oh.How?

BD: Through skill and determination we blast the bejesus out of things with mighty Wrath and Starfire onslaughts, carefully ensuring we don't cause wipes like lesser classes. Well, unless we hit the "oh-fuck" button, of course.

GH: Whats that?

BD: Starfall. Its like an AK47 in the hands of a toddler.

GH: Coooool.

GH: When I am big I am gonna be like you.

BD: (teardrops forming) Bless you my boy, bless you..../hug

Sunday Bloody Sunday

We like Sundays. Fresh coffee brewing in the Krupps and plenty of time to kill, messing around in battlegrounds. Since Wrath was rolled out, the Boomdaddy has been very quiet on the pvp front. There are three reasons for that I guess. Firstly, since hitting 80 all my spare WoW time has been spent raiding Naxx, Voa, EoE etc etc. Fill in time has to be spent making the money to pay for the luxury of raiding three or four times per week. With potions, elixirs, repairs and the such like I think we all rarely get change out of 750g per week. Being a crappy leatherworker does not unfortunately line the pockets with oodles of gold but that is a post for another day.

The second reason would be related to this damn achievement system. Again, my personal view of achievements can be left for another day but needless to say I'm not entirely happy about the whole system. Going back to the days of vanilla wow and TBC, pvp and arenas were an integral part of being a Boomkin. There simply wasn't the gear around to make us effective without spending huge dollops of time battering horde in AV. God bless that season 2 battle staff, merciless gladiator's shoulders etc etc. I did my time, got geared up the best I could and killed my share of wrong'ens. Knight Lieutenant is still the title I am most proud to display over my lovely shiny antlers. I WAS THERE MAN, I WAS THERE!!!! Sorry, flashbacks. Anyhow, with the achievements debacle, it appears that I am back to being a newbie in terms of pvp,after months of pvp the ignominy of having a big flashing achievement pop up displaying my first victory in AB was too much to bare. Hence pvp has been put back up the shelf until this last week.

Thirdly, we are feeling a bit crap at pvp. I dont know if it is that other classes have got much better at it with all the changes, or Boomkins have simply got much worse but back in the day being top dps in a bg was a fairy frequent occurrence. Now I feel like a seven stone weakling getting sand kicked in my face by death nuggets and even shaman. Warriors were always our favourite target dummy, so easy to root and nuke...but it appears not any longer.

Enough is enough though, and i cannot resist the urge to plunge nut deep back into some serious pvp, I've spent some time getting new shiny pvp things, resilience is at 670 and I'm going to try and reclaim the Boomkins rightful place back near the top of the pvp tree. I'll let you know how it pans out....28,215 wrong'ens down, which one of you hordies wants to be 28,216?

Mage-tards the new Huntards

Huntards are huntards. The poor things can't help themselves. Unless they have been well versed in the teachings of BRK or Liennas , then in which case the boomdaddy can give them a pass. The others that cannot be arsed to learn their trade can be resigned to the tissue I wipe on my boomkin boot.

Mage-tards, now thats another thing. Mages have always had it so damn good,they were always THE ranged raid dps to beat, but now always cry more than a prostate examanee. Huntards are crap because they were used to solo'ing and no one was there to tell them how to play nice in groups.They were not invited, so they did not learn. Mage-tards, on the other hand, just think they could translate wham bam into thankyou mam and screw the rest. Well you can't, you pointy hat wearing freaks.

Picture the scene, lovelies.Malygos 10 man/person/mage pond life....after a few tries. Get the big guy down to 34% after first phase. Boomdaddy's feathery sack is jingling like its christmas."Melee get on the discs " says raid leader, but oh no , on hops leiderhose wearing magetard for an achievement instead of allowing the melee. Wipe again , after the prick gets his achievement.Boomdaddy sighs a throaty, feathery sigh.

Do I blame blizz for making achievements, in order to fill the void in content, or the magetard for putting them before the raid?

Both are on the boomdaddy's shoot in the face list.

A new dawn, a new day, a new blog...hopefully

Having blogged in the past (in a purely navel gazing fashion) this is my least favourite post to make. It always feels like some form of justification has to be made as to why I feel I'm eminently qualified to write a blog at all, let alone one concerned with the highest evolution of druids, the Moonkin.Truth be told, I don't feel like the most qualified author of Boomkin musings but considering the apparent lack of Moonkin reading matter out there in the blogosphere, I do not feel that this little venture can hurt.



What I hope this blog will be........



Well, my aim is to share my Boomkin musings on a regular basis.The goal is a simple post each day but having blogged in the past, I know this can sometimes be a pipe dream. I hope that it will be possible to build a small resource here for all balance druids to talk, laugh and qq together, with useful links to balance druid information and the wider World of WoW. I will be asking for input from some fellow collaborators, such as the Boommummy who is a fellow artistic balance druid in my guild, but also from up and coming druids who can give focus to issues not only pertaining to level 80 boomers.Eventually, all being well, podcasts and other such loveliness will be forthcoming.



What to expect........


Humour and grumpiness. Occasional mage -bashing. Shameless links to eminent blogs that we read in order to become famous.


What not to expect......


Elitist Jerk number crunching, I am simply not that bright.


Welcome, from the Boomdaddy and the Boommummy!