I felt really guilty when I had to go kill those Netherwing-aligned drakes, too, after I’d started the rep chain with them. Stupid Blizzard.
Nope, it’s legit. It took “creative use of game mechanics” and over 4 hours, but the guy did it. Details here.
Yeah, I felt bad about doing those quests too.
I refused to do the ones where I had to kill the Netherwing drakes.
But then again, I avoid quests where I have to kill cats unless I absolutely have to, and the one to kill the faerie dragons in Feralas was very painful for me.
I think I’m a big softie. 
Iiiiiinteresting. Here’s the description, pulled from the Google cache, for anyone else who can’t reach that page from work. Spoilered to avoid WALL OF TEXT.
[spoiler]Eventually, I came up with 2 and in most cases 3 ways of handling every problem Patchwerk could throw at me. However, I also came into this fight with a technique I figured out elsewhere, a Shadowstep technique I dub Jiderstep. This technique involves an Unconscious Dig Rat which is considered a critter and it is just like any other rat/critter in game except for the fact you can drop it where you like and it stays put and lasts until it is killed or the server is restarted. You can shadowstep to it just like any other critter. Due to the significant increase in his health pool I tested my methods successfully on live servers in 10-man before moving on to kill it on 25-man live server.
The fight takes places in two positions, one in the tunnel past Grobbulus, the other on the floor along Patchwerk’s patrol path. The setup begins by Shadowstepping to Grobbulus on the platform he tosses his slimes from. I then go into the poison tunnel that leads to Gluth to drop an Unconscious Dig Rat at a key location inside the tunnel where there is a hole that leads back to Patchwerk’s room. This position and the floor position are important as they are beyond the leash points for Grobbulus and they allow me to Shadowstep up and drop down whenever I need to. Once the Unconscious Dig Rat is in the right position I jump down and buff and get ready to pull Patchwerk. I execute the pull by pre-potting and launching a Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket. The use of a ranged attack to pull is important as it will require him to path all the way to that point to reset/full heal after a Vanish or Shadowmeld.
After that, the fight basically becomes a repetition involving a few key ideas. Firstly, I never engage Patchwerk without Evasion. Anytime I am attacking and Evasion is about to wear off, I either Shadowstep up to the tunnel or drop down to the floor. This forces him to spend a great deal of time pathing which enables me to wait for the Evasion cooldown and to heal myself. Another key point is using Vanish and Shadowmeld appropriately. On the initial aggro of Patchwerk, his trash is also put into combat which requires me to Vanish it off but I also use it during the fight to reset his enrage timer which eliminates the need to deal with the increased damage and slime bolts. To do this, I wait for Preparation to come back up, and then I wait until Patchwerk reaches the poison tunnel position. I jump off and immediately Shadowmeld which gets me out of combat and gives me time to eat and/or rebuff as needed. My potion timer also resets. Since I am no longer in combat Patchwerk is in evade mode and begins his pathing back from the tunnel through Grobbulus’ room. This is where the pull positioning comes in to play as I am already waiting to intercept him well before his final reset point which would heal him to full. When I engage him his trash aggros again which forces me to Vanish. I watch carefully and if that Vanish fails to reset the trash I burn Preparation and Vanish again. This cycle is repeated until the boss is dead which resulted in a fight lasting 4 hours 45 minutes on my kill.[/spoiler]
That doesn’t sound right. How can he intercept before Patchwerk’s destination and HP reset? I thought it was Evade all the way back to there.
Could have to do with proximity to his leash location. Or could be boss mechanics vs. world mechanics.
Is this thread taking a very long time to load for anyone else?
Q
Well, for healing heroics, sure that level of haste/gear is just fine. But, knowing that winterhawk11 is in a progressed raiding guild, and that this druid may eventually start running ICC regularly, an 18/0/53 spec is better suited, especially as he starts getting gear that will get him closer to the haste soft-cap(s) of 735 with CF, 856 without. If you’re not raiding and do not plan on doing that content, then whatever works for you is fine, but if you’re trying to do that content, then haste will help. Sure, it is definitely harder to notice, but when you’re doing the standard 5x1 rotation on fights like Sindragosa or Blood Queen, you can definitely tell the difference between a few percentages of haste (i.e. having a Wrath of Air totem or not having one). It’s harder to notice when you’re only gaining some haste rating over a period of time, but it is noticeable when you lose it. I would never suggest, for example, gemming pure haste to reach cap or anything, as spellpower is definitely the best stat for resto druids overall, but using some Reckless Ametrines in red and yellow sockets is a good idea until you start to push or get over the cap. Again, it’s a more intangible gain than seeing larger Rejuv ticks, but it is definitely useful to have when you need to help blanket the raid in HoTs.
As for Nourish, I think it’s an under-rated spell. Druids usually get regulated to being seen as “solely” raid healers due to the excellence of our toolkit in handling that job, but there are times where you need to be flexible and Nourish is an invaluable tool in having that flexibility. Tossing large, single-target heals may not be our bread and butter, but it can be a lifesaver for tanks or anyone else in your party, and when you can get it to a 1 second cast (with Nature’s Grace that can be quite easy), it’s very nice.
Anyway, like I said, the only reason I disagreed with your recommendations was due to my knowledge of winterhawk11’s situation. 14/0/57 was a great spec, especially during 3.1.x for Ulduar, when the haste cap was closer to 380 or so. But, I prefer running with an 18/0/53 spec now, as haste cap is much harder to reach, and then 11/0/60 afterward for the utility talents that you can pick up in the Resto tree, but that’s more of a matter of personal taste, at that point.
Thanks all for the recent Holy Pally talk, I have made a few changes and I am keeping more DPS alive now than I used to, how I went so long without using Holy Shock regularly and having Beacon on the tank all the time I don’t know. My mana bar is always an issue though and I had to pop Divine Plea on a boss fight the other day for the first time which was interesting (for those that don’t know DP gives you mana but nerfs your healing). I have put an action bar visible when I enter combat just off my Grid setup which shows all my cooldowns, having them right there has meant I use them a lot more.
One thing about Grid and Clique – is there any way of binding the mouse wheel to a spell? The author says wait for Clique v2 but I was wondering if anyone had a workaround or another way of doing it?
Also druids as we are discussing those at the moment. I mentioned previously that in my guild we are all rolling alts to level up and help low level new recruits. I have decided on a druid. He’s level 16 and up to now it has been a breeze and very enjoyable but I am having a serious problem with runners. There is a quest in northern Darkshore where you have to pick up some fungi in a Naga infested cave and I keep dying, if a mob runs even a few yards they’ll pick up another Naga. Am I missing a trick? I start out with Wrath then Moonfire then melee as Bear usually but don’t have a stun to stop the runner? Moonfire is an option but often that doesn’t hit hard enough to kill.
And finally when you run instances as dps on a druid am I going to be a liability at this level? I don’t have cat form yet obviously so it will be a mixture of spells and bear melee I would expect. I aim to tank on this char when I PuG but when I run with other low level guildies we are taking it in turns to tank, we have a lot of new prot pallys and warriors :). Could I heal as feral at this level? Anyone tried that?
To address a few points:
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Hope you set up a clear notification for all of your cooldowns like using Power Auras or something. Also, it helps to have an on-use spellpower trinket to bind to Divine Plea so that you use it to counteract the throughput loss when you need to regen mana.
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Not sure if you use any bar mods, then you can just regularly bind the mousewheel scroll up or down to the button of the spell. For example, on my mage I have my main spam spells bound to both up and down and I use Dominos as my bar mod. For your paladin, I would just suggest making mouseover macros instead of using Clique full-time to heal, because you know that they will never break and, in my opinion, are just as effective (if not more so). I don’t use Clique, so not sure if I can help there.
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As far as runners go while leveling your feral, do you have Entangling Roots yet? That would be the easiest way to deal with them. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to try to pull them to a safe area where they are far from other mobs and killing them as they run away. Obviously, Bash is on a long-ish CD, so you won’t be able to use it all the time.
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As far as healing while Feral, it’s more dependent on your gear than anything else at that level. You can definitely do it as long as you have the mana pool for it. There are also talents in the Feral tree that increase your stats, so you can get some really insane mana pools for druids. I can heal effectively as Feral at max level, but I also overgear heroics. Not sure how long that will be effective for you, though. You may reach a point where you just need some of the talents in the Resto tree to heal effectively.
Cheers, and have fun leveling your druid.
You’re not really missing anything, Darkshore just kind of suck, at higher levels you can get Glyph of Rake(sucks in the long term but can be useful while leveling) and later on Infected Wounds to deal with runners.
At really low levels spec doesn’t make much difference, once you reach say, 40ish you’ll probably notice the difference, but as long as you have gear for it I would be surprised if you can’t heal as feral at least until level 60.
So I’m wondering one thing about my Disc gear: does the Ephemeral Snowflake (http://www.wowarmory.com/item-info.xml?i=50260) make sense for a Disc priest or should I be looking to replace it. It seems like it would be awesome for a druid, but I only have one HoT that I use (plus prayer of mending I guess).
In general, does anyone see anything I should be doing with my Disc stuff?
I’ve been mainly gemming for spellpower and int.
That’s usually when I start to use it. For times when the tank just starts losing way more HP per second than my HOTs can cope with, I turn on the Nourish firehose and just start spamming until the danger’s gone.
Dropping aggro causes the mob to head back to its intial aggro location. It only regains its HP when it reaches that location. During the walk back, it is Evading and cannot be hit but can still acquire targets on its own and go about engaging them. Pulling that off is hit or miss with your average generic mob, but bosses, especially those with pulsing triggered powers like Patch’s hateful strike, have rather more aggressive target acquisition than your average mob, as many a rogue, mage and hunter who’ve tried to avoid a raid death have discovered. All he had to do was position himself in the path ahead of the aggro point.
The clever bit of that plan was the dig rat shadowstep to utilize a convenient quirk of Naxx’s layout. The rest are standard rogue tricks, it’s the massive path routing that made that actually work, along with the fact that Patch is one of the very few bosses with no unavoidable damage.
Aw, shucks. For the last week or two the internet filter that my company uses has not been applied, so I was able to directly access wowhead, wowwiki, etc. Prior to that, if I wanted to look up an article, I had to hope I could pull it up in Google cache.
It looks like we’ve switched to a new filtering product – which not only blocks game-related sites, but is also smart enough to block cached images of game sites as well 
I went to look up “Ephemeral Snowflake” and got blocked twice. I don’t want to try too many times because I don’t want to show up on some report somewhere. Oh well!
BDL dungeon run summary:
After anticipating a full five-man group, our healer never showed up last night. We waited awhile and then just got into queue for a pug healer; but knowing that we might never get one for our planned run of Mechanar we placed ourselves in the Northrend random queue instead and (since two of us are 69) unsurprisingly ended up in Utgarde Keep.
In a way it was nice since it’s the first dungeon I’ve tanked since probably SFK that I knew the layout of really well, so it went pretty quickly. I just had to learn some tanking moves that, as a healer, I never paid attention to before (like positioning the mobs and avoiding bombs). Having our hunter (Shin Kell) constantly misdirect to me made holding aggro pretty easy too even with dps that outleveled me. It would have been nice if a single piece of plate had dropped though. Oh, and I did ding 69 right before we went in.
I’ll check in with our healer again and plan to go back to Mechanar next week (5/2).
Hey Tom,
Ephemeral Snowflake is a nice trinket to have in case you run into fights where your mana is tight and where Shadowfiend+Hymn isn’t enough to get you mana back to last. However, in general I would look to try and replace it with a +spellpower trinket as Disc priests don’t get any spellpower via Spirit and so are usually needing to get that via gear. Obviously, Solace of the Fallen is a great trinket, but it’s rare drop rate makes it hard to get (though, from your gear, you should be able to get into PUGs for it, unless your realm is ridiculous about GS limitations). Other possibilities are the The Egg of Mortal Essence via badges or the other Intellect trinket Tears of the Vanquished from Trial of the Champion (normal) if you want some more crit/mana. Otherwise, there aren’t many great trinkets available outside of ICC10/25. Your gemming seems alright, but I prefer gemming for spellpower in all sockets, so yellow sockets would be ametrines (usually Luminous) and blue would be dreadstones (either Purified or Royal, but I only put Purified in gear that I share with my shadow spec).
As for your spec, do you PvP as Disc as well? Because Reflective Shield and Unbreakable Will are pretty much pure PvP talents. If you’re only PvEing with that spec, I would highly suggest getting 3/3 Improved Inner Fire (actually, I’d suggest this talent if PvPing as well) and 2/2 Aspiration, as Penance is a great spell and reducing the CDs of both Pain Suppression and Power Infusion is fantastic. I would pull points out of Reflective Shield, Unbreakable Will and Silent Resolve in order to do so. Just my $.02. Hope it helps.
ETA: I believe the Ephemeral Snowflake also provides the mana back for Power Word: Shield if you’re glyphed for it (which you are), so as that’s the #1 spell used by most Disc priests, it should be netting you some decent mana savings, comparable to those seen by a resto druid wearing the trinket.
Hm. I have a Darkmoon Card: Illusion; should I pop that into the snowflake’s spot?
Thanks for the spec notes. I do PvP, but mainly as a sideline - I don’t have any PvP gear and just basically spam heals in the battlegrounds; somehow I failed to notice for a long time that inner fire gave a spellpower bonus in addition to the armor so I didn’t talent it :smack:.
Oh! I almost forgot this story from last night.
So we had just started UK (we were in the furnace area) when I get a whisper. I can’t remember the name exactly but it was a feminine name, something like “Jenna” but that’s not it exactly. She whispers me, “Hey.” I checked so see if this was the healer we just pugged and it wasn’t, so I have no idea who it is. I /reply “Yes?” Still trying to pull/tank mobs here.
She /whispers back something weird like “Do you want to play WoW Now?” I don’t reply, because I’m a little busy trying to tank here. After a few minutes she whispers me again: “Well?” And I reply “I’m a little busy here.”
A few more minutes go by and she says, “?”. That’s when I put her on ignore.
Probably some kind of gold seller I’m guessing, but it’s the first time one has ever tried to start a conversation with me. Hey, is there a way to look at your Ignore list? I should go back and see who it was.
I have a Power Aura for Infusion of Light only at the moment. Unlike when I was tanking (when I had power auras set up for all the 69696 abilities) it’s not like I’ll be using these abilities (say Divine Illumination) every time they are off cooldown or is that what you’re suggesting I do?
No Spell Power trinket no I’ll investigate that thanks, good idea. Trinkets are way down on my gear list though I have only looted a grand total of 54 Triumph and 22 Frost in the 3 and a bit months since I hit 80.
I use Bartender and this area is one thing I don’t think is quite right at the moment. I have tried to set it up so that my key bindings are the same when running heroics or doing pvp or doing my dailies. The problem is there is a lot of redundancy when I switch roles and some abilities are in handy key binds that I only use in one role. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and change my second spec from prot to holy and set up one UI for healing and one for dailies\pvp.
I’m not sure if you can bind a button to mousewheel up\down in Bartender I’ll check tonight.
For the other healers here do you use mouseover macros and key bindings or clique\healbot\vuhdo?
Entangling Roots has a cast time so by the time I have cast that they have come back with friends. The cave in Darkshore I mention has no where to pull anyone unfortunately.
Thanks I’ll get hold of some gear to boost my mana.
Thanks, I miss my Hammer and Judgement of Justice:(