.

But is it going to be enough? Looking at how things have been entire Wrath I seriously doubt it. Let’s look at all the buffs we’ve got so far in Wrath (ones affecting our PvE DPS).

Patch 3.1 (2009/04/14)

- Eclipse: The benefit to Wrath triggered by casting Starfire has been increased to 30% bonus damage.

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

- Celestial Focus redesigned: Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting Starfire, Hibernate and Hurricane by 23/46/70% and increases your total spell haste by 1/2/3%.

Patch 3.1.2 (2009/05/19)

- Improved Moonkin Form: Now grants 10/20/30% of spirit as spell power.

Patch 3.2 (2009/08/04)

- Eclipse: The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30-second cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.

Patch 3.3 (2009/12/09)

- Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect
firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse. In addition,
Eclipse now grants a 40% critical strike chance to Starfire and 40% increased damage to Wrath,
up from 30%.

Patch 3.3.2 (???)

- Earth and Moon: This talent now increases your spell damage by 2/4/6% (Up from 1/2/3%)

Well at least it’s a good buff. And the fact that we’re getting attention keeps my hopes up. Recent Blizzard developer chat had couple good questions and answers:

Q: Any plans on looking at Balance Druids, in particular to Eclipse procs? RNG sometimes is detrimental to our dps.
A: We don’t mind the RNG aspect that much per se, but losing an important proc because it happened at the wrong time (say just before you moved) is a problem. We have a pretty cool solution for Cataclysm if we can make it work. It makes Eclipse cooler but also gives Balance more of a kit in general.

Q: Both balance druids (moonkin) and elemental shaman feel like their dps is falling behind in Icecrown Citadel. Any damage boosts for these hybrid casters currently planned?
A: We have small buffs coming in the next patch. We’ll see where they are after that when more encounters are open (including the hard modes) and once more players have tier sets and higher gear in general. We have no problem buffing them more if we need to.

If/when more buffing is needed I hope they don’t take too much time with it. I need the DPS increase now when we’re still working our way through the content… not when we already overgear everything.

And what comes to cooler Eclipse… well. I certainly hope so.

Maybe one day… I’m not incredible DPS fanatic so to speak. I’ll do my best that will hopefully be enough. If I’m at 7th or so in DPS done then I’d be pretty satisfied. Right now that’s obviously not the case and I’m really not sure how I should feel about it. On the other hand I feel like I am doing something wrong but I’m also aware the class is working far from ideal. Meh.

1. Get an authenticator

Ok this I already got.. hooray. Nobody’s going to steal my 5 years of hard work.

2. Finish Loremaster on my druid

I only need to do few Northrend areas and I would be done.. but for some reason I can’t get myself to do it. Maybe one day.

3. Get past 8000 achievement points

Currently at 7240 and I’ve pretty much done all fun ones. Rest require either hard work or PvP. Ugh. Or just wait for Cataclysm.

4. Redo the layout of my blog

I’m not really happy how it looks. I pretty much just hastily got something together so I could get started. Next time I’ll put more thought and time to it.

5. Level Jewelcrafting

I have couple characters who have it but both got skill under 200. Probably would do it on my paladin since she’s the only lvl 80 one.

6. Gear up my current lvl 80 alts

That means warrior and warlock. Rogue and paladin are pretty much done.

7. Attend more WoW-podcast live recordings

I’ve slipped a bit about this. The thing is when it’s evening in US it’s crazy early morning here. However every time I get myself stay up or set the clock to wake me up for it I will later feel it was worth it. More coffee I guess.

8. Finish the remaining holiday achievements

Missing 7.. mostly annoying stuff like Perma-Peddle. I did get my Violet Proto-Drake last year so at least that’s done.

9. Collect rest of the vanity pets on my ‘wanted’ list

This means everything non-loot card, promotional or expensive.

10. Do some WoW-related fan art

…and actually put it on web. Stay tuned.

The wait was long but we finally got something else to do raidwise than farm ToC. But was it worth the wait? So far my opinion is yes… and holy crap we got trash again! How cool is that?! Anyway.. difficultywise the first four bosses were nothing that special.. once you got the tactic ironed out that’s it. In my guild the first four were all cleared during the first week. But this does not mean they would not have been fun. Oh I absolutely enjoyed all of them..

Lord Marrowgar

On normal mode this comes down to killing the spikes fast enough, which isn’t hard. Fires don’t hit hard and are easy to avoid when you see them slowly creeping up to you. Bonestorm doesn’t hit for much either if you just run away from it. But when you think of it… do you ever completely avoid the Bonestorm? No and the room is very small.. so I would guess doing this on hardmode will be a whole lot different thing.

His model is really, really, really, really cool though.

Lady Deathwhisper

Ok this is my favorite one so far. Trick is finding the right balance between DPS on adds and DPS on boss, switching quickly between targets and getting a smooth transition to last phase.

How we did it was pretty much the casters mainly on boss but helping out with adds from time to time, everyone else.. melee and hunters are full time on adds. This fight brings the evil side in me.. finally after months of ToC where it’s always the ranged who get the annoying job of switching targets constantly while melee happily just sits on boss and tops the DPS meters. Well.. guess what guys.. revenge is sweet. <3

Well okey I am not completely just on boss... what I like to do is as I am shooting the boss I'll be constantly panning my camera around the room to see when transformed adds spawn and be ready to run if you get the green stuff under your feet. Really fun fight where you have to focus on reacting very quickly.

I bet this will be a nightmare on hardmode too.

The Gunship Battle

This was actually one of the fights I was looking forward to most. And well… it’s kinda disapointingly easy. To be honest this is the new ‘chess’ encounter. Everyone remembers it from Karazhan don’t we? It’s fun, but it’s also very easy.

Rocket pack is pretty fun too.. except when I use it my Moonkin form disappears. Hrm. The loot issues are very bad.. if player is on the enemy ship when encounter ends he probably does not get loot. This seriously needs a fix.. done this two times now and both times we’ve had people who were not eligible for loot in the end. How about something simple as when you start the encounter the game checks and tags the people who are on the boat, and when it ends all of those players get the credit if they’re at least somewhere inside the instance.

Not much to this.. just queue up ‘The Airship Pirate’ by Abney Park and have fun.

Deathbringer Saurfang

Now we’re starting to see some difficulty here. The room is very small for 25 people so you don’t have much room to spread which can make it a bit frustrating.. I know I have been. The adds are not a serious trouble if they got at least some sort of slow effect on them. Focused fire can take them down very fast. Other than that there’s not really anything else to it. Swap between boss and adds and keep your position.

I liked the little cutscene after the fight. What kinda confused me was Varian showing sympathy towards Saurfang (the elder, not the one you just killed). This has to be a trick.. he was just trying to fish some ‘hey I’m not that bad’ points. Well d’uh.. I’m not impressed.

All in all it was pretty entertaining start for the new instance and I’m looking forward to the next wing opening in.. err, I’m guessing 6th January. That’s couple more weeks but since there’s Xmas in between it doesn’t really matter since most people are away and we could not hassle 25 together anyway.

So.. patch 3.3 has been out for a little over a week now and I thought I could talk a little about the new stuff… lots of good things and I’m quite happy how it turned out. Even the server came back online in time.

Druid changes

* Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse. In addition, Eclipse now grants a 40% critical strike chance to Starfire and 40% increased damage to Wrath, up from 30%.

I’m pretty happy how all this WiseEclipse addon episode turned out. Personally I didn’t use it beyond trying it out since at the time only thing we were doing was farming ToC and I did not feel necessary I should rely on a mod to increase my DPS. So actually my damage went up a bit with the patch unlike for those who were using the mod. :P And you have to admit.. the way the mod increased your DPS felt a bit like cheating.

* Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.

While it’s a good change I can’t say I am 100% happy about this. If someone dies you should not kinda get away with it so easily. Ressing is annoying too… eats your DPS, mana and screws up your Eclipse.

* Force of Nature: Health on the treants has been increased.
* Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Good! There’s nothing more annoying than boss 1-shotting them. PvP side doesn’t matter much to me since I don’t do PvP on druid (anymore).

The Looking for Dungeon system

Woah.. this came out a lot better than I expected it to be. I am not a fan of pugging anything… ever since the early Burning Crusade I’ve avoided it like plague. It’s amazing how much it does when you eliminate the hassle of getting group together to minimum. And if it’s a really bad group the downtime for trying again is very little.

What I don’t like is how the cross-realm activities seem to make some people think they can behave however they please because the other players are not from same server and it does not matter what they think. This is very common in battlegrounds but there it at least was limited to the chat. Now you have to worry about the cross-server-ninjas too. I haven’t had that many bad experiences yet but there’s been a few. One in particular bothered me.. I was doing some emblem farming runs on my rogue and a hunter from one of my servers higher end raiding guilds was there. Once we had finished he need rolled on Frozen Orb and quickly left the group. After I was out I did a /who on him and noticed he was in Ironforge. I even went as far as checking the auction house and sure enough he had put it on sale right away. Now I could not care less about the item but doing stuff like that just isn’t cool. What I think many players haven’t even thought about is when they behave badly ‘in public’ it’s not only their reputation which plummets in the eyes of others but it’s their guilds reputation too.

Another thing what bugs me is the silent players. How hard it is just to say hello at start and thank for the group when you’re done? Seriously. Sure you join the LFD for the rewards and not to socialize but there’s no reason you can’t be friendly while doing it. I had this one pug where I said hello in the start but nobody else said nothing during the whole instance run. That kinda upset me and didn’t bother to thank for the smooth run once we were done.

Okey the last thing.. loot. There is no way in hell I am going for full scale pug, rather not even partial, if I actually need something else than emblems. You never know what kind of people you end up with and I really don’t want to risk it. If you need loot, go with the guild group.

The new instances

I’m just going to talk about the new 5mans… the raid instance(s) valid their own post which will come in the near-future.

Have to say I’m very impressed. The design on all 3 new ones is close to raid quality and they clearly put effort to it. Bosses are really fun too and have nicely varying abilities you have to watch for. Pit of Saron is probably my favorite one in terms of design and for bosses Ick and Krick. Only thing what kinda ruined that encounter is the gnome yelling instructions.. while it was kinda funny it also spoiled figuring out the encounter yourself.

First time I was doing all 3 on heroic we ended up losing 1 DPS just as we came to Halls of Reflection.. and since you kinda have to unlock the instances we could not just ask someone to come and fill in. Soo we 4manned it which was very exciting to be honest.. not had so much fun in a 5man for a while.

And even more HoR fun followed.. this time on normal mode as we 3manned it. Warrior tank, shadow priest and myself on holy paladin. First bit went just fine but for the last one I had to swap on my retri spec.. so we did it without dedicated healing and it worked. Heh.

Lootwise the ToC trend continues with good items and I will be picking up lots of them for my alts. My druid obviously has better gear than what 5man has to offer but I didn’t get completely left out. Aah.. Nevermelting Ice Crystal is just amazing. For some reason dropwise my guild has had the worst luck with caster DPS trinkets. For example the one from Anub’arak didn’t drop a single time. Not freaking once. I could complain about trinkets a bit more but let’s leave it to this…

So the design was cool, bosses were fun, loot was great.. but what I enjoyed most was the storymode that carried through all 3 instances. I can’t say I know every last detail about lore but I do enjoy it a lot and I’m always eager to learn more.

Aaand you got to love the new Jaina model.. hrhr. <3

Random minor stuff

* Arena Set Bonuses: The two-piece set bonus for all Wrath of the Lich King Arena sets now provides 100 resilience and 29 spell power or 50 attack power. The current four-piece bonus will remain, however it also now provides 88 spell power or 150 attack power.

Amazing news for my PvP rogue(s). I kinda like the fact that you get compensated a little more for wearing items that sacrifice a lot of damage for the more defensive stats. There’s a lot of debate about should you wear PvE or PvP armor and this tips it more towards the PvP as it should be.

* Ignore list expanded to 50 to match the friends list.

Awesome.

New ground animations for Hippogryph mounts came out really cute. I’ve had the Cenarion War Hippogryph since it got into game and the lack of ground animation has been kinda annoying. At least the poor bird can stand on his feet instead of hovering around all the time.

All in all I think this patch has started out really well and I’m looking forward to having more fun with alts outside raids and with my main in the ICC 25.

There is no such thing as perfect class, each one has some weakness(es). Which is fine by me but some things are just plain horrible and I can’t understand why steps have not been taken to correct them. Or maybe there is something in the works but I seriously doubt we’ll see anything before Cataclysm. Here’s two things that piss me off the most.

Eclipse

In Burning Crusade the casting rotation for balance druid was very simple; dots up, spam Starfire. It was boring but it had predictability and control. Then along comes the pre-WotLK patch with new talents and Eclipse is introduced. Certainly it made the casting rotation more interesting and you had to pay a little more attention to it but the downsides of the mechanic are just freaking annoying.

Basically the casting rotation is just one big RNG fest now. Only way you can control the proc going off bad time is not to DPS at all beyond applying dots. Also with the rather short duration of the Eclipse proc came debates when you should apply dots during Eclipse or should you do it at all. This is something people still don’t seem to agree about. Thankfully Eclipse improved a little in patch 3.2 by Lunar and Solar procs having their separate cooldowns. That was the end of debate which proc is better and at very least meant applying dots at ‘wrong time’ would not cost you so much DPS as it previously did.

However the fact that you still can’t control it makes it very frustrating mechanic. How well you know the class, push your buttons, what kind of gear you got and how well you minimize movement during encounters are the main contributors to your DPS. But once you perfect that you’re going to hit a wall, and once you bump into it you can’t help to notice how someone has spray painted ‘RNG’ on it with big pink letters. No matter how well you know your stuff a big chunk of your DPS will be determined by pure luck. If it does not proc, or it procs in bad time you’re pretty much screwed. Sure you can stack crit rating like mad to try and maximize the odds but is not going to solve it – you’ll still have awkward times when the bloody thing just is not playing ball. I’d rather have DPS rotation with 10 different spells than this. At least I would feel like I’m in control and can actually do something to improve rather than this.

Movement

Many encounters are heavy on the movement, which is fun, I like those more than tank and spank fights. However high movement fights are the ones where your DPS will be even lower compared to pure DPS classes because they got some ability to help their movement. Warlocks got teleport, mages can blink and hunters got disengage. Sure they’re not perfect but balance druid does not have anything – and neither does other hybrid ranged DPS either (elemental shaman, shadow priest).

I don’t mind being slightly lower on potential damage as hybrid vs the pure but I think the movement fights give unfair advantage to the pure classes. Also with the unpredictability of Eclipse you often just waste most of your proc because you had to run somewhere.

Well aren’t they the unholy duo, Eclipse and movement. Gragh. Often I just feel like I’m dragging this huge iron ball in a chain on my feet while trying to play. What balance druid really lacks in my opinion is the feeling that you’re in control. Too many vital things are just based on pure chance. These two things are what I would really want to see improved in Cataclysm but I don’t have very high hopes about it happening. Let’s keep fingers crossed anyway.

Last week me and few others finally completed long journey of Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 player). I know by now some of the challenge has weared off when everyone is wearing better gear and all that but it still was fun and at least somewhat challenging effort. By the time Trial of the Crusader rolled out I had got really tired of Ulduar… but after not going there for a while it felt nice and refreshing again which made this achievement all the more fun to do. It took fair few weeks since we really didn’t go there more than once a week for 3 hours with maybe couple exceptions. Extended raid lockouts really came handy with this since if we’d had to re-clear every time it would have taken way longer.

Now when I’m not so much tied up with *cough* Dragon Age *cough* anymore let’s take a look on all of the meta achievements required for this one.

Orbit-uary (10 player)

My least favorite fight with the most annoying way possible.. blergh. My role every time was just to be shot up Leviathan and destroy the turrets. Can’t say there’s much to it. I use Wild Magic Potion first time I’m up there but beyond that there’s not much to do than just blast away. When I was back at gunner spot on Demolisher all I pretty much did was shot down Pyrite and loaded it. Can’t really speak for other vehicles and how difficult they were since I’ve never done anything else.

Stokin’ the Furnace (10 player)

Speed kill and hence not much special to do… pew pew.

Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare (10 player)

This is one of those achievements you’d call ’silly’. Razorscale’s flame breath does 15k damage so you need to keep those Guardians alive and under 15k health. What you should do is just have one tank pick all Guardians, have someone DPS them a little but not too much since the NPCs also attack them and if you bring them down too soon you risk killing them. If you do not DPS Razorscale at all you get more tries on flaming the dwarves. You’ll most likely hit the enrage timer once and wipe, but on 2nd pull you miss only few dwarves and can do DPS on Razor too.

Heartbreaker (10 player)

You kill the heart and XT gains damage and health boost, gravity bombs spawn void zones and light bombs spawn adds to be killed. It’s only really about more intense healing, being more careful with gravity bombs and killing the spawning adds asap since they damage the whole raid when they’re up. Really simple all in all.

I Choose You, Steelbreaker (10 player)

Heh what am I going to say about this.. my job is always so easy. The challenge in this is for the healers and tanks.. so I as DPS don’t have much to worry about. Don’t die and dps as well as you can?

Disarmed (10 player)

DPS left arm down to low, DPS middle to less than 30% but not under 15%, keep killing right arm until Kologarn is under 30%, then kill both left and right arm under 12s from each other and you win. Can’t say there is much to it.

Crazy Cat Lady (10 player)

Do what you’d normaly except do not kill the cats. Once again nothing I as DPS didn’t have to worry about.

I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare (10 player)

Oh look a DPS race. Free mage first, try to stack buffs as well as you can, DPS the heck out of it and you win. Use Wild Magic Potion when you got storm buff, moonlight buff and lunar eclipse.

Lose Your Illusion (10 player)

Reach Thorim under 3 minutes, stay spread to avoid chain lightning jumping, stand away from walls to avoid blizzard, when you see lightning charge building up run away from that side of the room. Shapeshift if you got slow effect from Sif’s frost bolt. When running away from lightning charge it’s hard to keep the spread and avoid chain lightning but it would be worse to get hit by lightning charge. Just run back once it’s safe again and keep the optimal spread.

Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood (10 player)

Leaving the Elders alive mostly just means she and her adds will hit harder. You’ll do what you’d do normaly anyway.. just do it better. Although now you also need to free rooted people. As a druid you can just shapeshift out of them but not everyone has that luxury. I found it handy to have a macro with /target strengthened iron roots to quickly get them down.

In my opinion this is one of the harder achievements in Ulduar. It’s not overly complicated or anything but it’s a lot of different stuff you need to do which makes it very technical.

Firefighter (10 player)

Ok this was the hardest by far in my opinion. Very big awareness fight.. there’s tons of stuff that could kill you if you’re not paying attention. Also it is heavy on movement so as balance druid it was a nightmare.. we get very heavy penalty from having to move around and losing eclipse time. I really enjoyed it though. This for me felt greater than anything since Sartharion 3D back in the early Wrath.

I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning (10 player)

Err… what the.. This was way way easier than I would have thought. All I did was exactly same thing as on normal mode. Avoiding shadow crashes is very easy, only thing where you really have to shape up is when you got life leech and well.. that’s not so difficult either. My screen lights up like xmas tree when I got it so.. hard to miss and not move. I suppose it’s just how fast you pick a direction to run to. I think the challenge was again on the healers since they could not get mana back with the crystal pools.

One Light in the Darkness (10 player)

Had not seen this guy for a good while so it was somewhat about re-learning the encounter again. But then again… you do not have to do anything special. Do what you’d do on normal mode anyway, just do it better.

All in all it was really fun experience doing all these achievements. Now when they are done we’ve had couple tries on Algalon and so far.. well. It does not feel impossible but it needs some work. I’ll be sure to at least tweet about it if something fancy happens.

Thanks for everyone who participated in doing this stuff, including you special guest stars who filled in few times.

It has been 6 months since I started working on this blog and I thought I should take a look back on how’s it been going. There has been ups and downs but mostly it has been very positive experience. My main goal from the start was just to have fun with it and I achieved that. Also it definitely has been a learning experience… and I’m not only talking about the technical side. I’m not new to writing but it still surprised me how much work writing one post takes.

How does one write with those Moonkin claws then

Slowly. Average amount of time it takes me to write one post is 5-7 hours. First I stare at the screen for few minutes, then write one sentence, stare at it for couple minutes, scratch my head a bit and write another sentence. Lots of coffee infused creative breaks too when I just listen to random music, sip my coffee and plan what to write next (np: The Dresden Dolls – My Alcoholic Friends). I’m not sure why it takes so long.. can’t I come up with things very fast or do I just want to really really think it through first. Oh well.. it can only get faster over time so whatever. This is main reason why I don’t write more often than roughly once a week.

After the text is done it takes me maybe an hour to do the artwork and code. It may be just screenshots and working with Model Viewer but it does take some time. Especially if I don’t have a clear idea what I want to do and just mess around to see what would be nice. One thing I hate in Wordpress is the visual editor. I tried it once and the post looked absolutely terrible and I just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. Positioning pictures was a total nightmare. Good thing I’m familiar with html to some extent so I could just write my own code and get exactly the kind of results I wanted.

Biggest challenges

Technical stuff. Since I wanted to do a self hosted blog and I had no prior experience about Wordpress or any other blogging platform it took a lot of reading before I could start. I kept reading and re-reading the instructions and to be honest it just felt more confusing everytime. Eventually I just tried to install it and see if I got it right or not… and you know what I got it right the first time. Huh. Guess it sounded more difficult on paper than it actually was.

That obstacle I passed but there’s another I still haven’t solved and it is absolutely driving me insane. Talking about properly setting up the RSS feed here. Yes it’s up there and it works but it does not work the way I’d want it to work. Problem is it’s not showing full text in feed. I’ve set it to display ‘full text’ from options but no result. And I read something that some older RSS versions are not able to display full text but RSS 2 should and I think I’ve set it to that… I think. I’ve done googling, reading through Wordpress and Feedburner manuals, various forums and Elune knows what else but I just can’t get it to work. I realise it is terribly annoying to subscribe to a blog and not be able to read posts on conviniently on your feed reader and I apologise my readers for that. If anyone knows what might be the problem and how to solve it please send me an email and be my hero.

Time for fun

There’s a few posts I’ve really enjoyed writing.

One Druid’s Journey

The story of my main character was so much fun to write. And not just to write but also go through literally hundreds of old screenshots from times long gone. Raiding Molten Core in Tier 0? Feels like a lifetime ago. This post also has attracted most reader comments so I’m glad others have found it fun to read too.

Changes to make Scarlet Monastery heroic

I’m sure everyone has an opinion about what classic instance they would want to see revived. I did too and when this topic came up at Blog Azeroth I could not let it pass. As I was writing this I actually was at Scarlet Monastery.. checking out the rooms bosses where in to figure out what kind of mechanics would fit in and I also read through their current abilities to see what was cool and could work at higher level too and what I would change or add.

Big Game Hunter

I love reminiscing. I’m not saying everything was better back in the dawn of WoW but things definitely were more crazy which makes it so fun topic.

In the year 2000

For now I will keep going as I have now but I also do have some plans to evolve the site a bit. I don’t want to say anything definite because I don’t know can I pull it off in the end but let’s just say I’m looking on different ways to add more content besides just text. What’s kinda holding me back right now is lack of disk space to work with. Yes it sounds silly but I don’t really want to delete anything and I’m running pretty tight budjet at the moment so… Maybe something comes up early next year. We’ll see.

As far as writing goes I tried to make clear from the start that even though this is a balance druid blog I will also write about more general things. However if I can look at those other things from druid perspective I will do that. I think it has worked fairly well so far and I will keep at it. Completely non-WoW posts will probably appear eventually but they will always be in minority.

Lastly I want to thank all my readers for their interest and support. I know I have hardly advertised this site anywhere so how you found your way here is a total mystery to me. I hope I can keep you interested in future too.

/hugs

-DP

Big part of how successfull you are in WoW is do you have the resources to back up your doings. Most people do not have all crafting or gathering professions on their characters and they need to rely on support from friends or gold to fill in the gaps. And even if you’d have all of the professions there will still be at very least the repair costs. Nowadays it’s very easy to get gold but it wasn’t always. Back in vanilla, and most of Burning Crusade there were no daily quests to do. You had to grind, grind and grind a bit more. So let’s take a trip down the memory lane and see what was the hot stuff back then (from my personal point of view obviously). This is TOP 10 countdown of most grinded mobs pre-wrath.

Aah the legendary patch 1.9 and Ahn’Qiraj. Handfull of repeatable quests which mostly involved killing bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. And I did kill bugs.. enough to get exalted with Cenarion Circle. All the Silithid were elites so you could not solo them with all characters and those who could not were forced to group up. I however could, outdoors anyway.. roots didn’t work indoors back then. I can’t imagine how frustrating it would have been if I would not have been able to solo them. Grindy stuff like that is something you want to do on your own time… late at night. I wonder what for I was grinding the reputation anyway. Oh well.. couple years later you got a fancy title for it.

Yes this is a fish. And quite elusive one. You can fish it from several locations: Hinterlands, Winterspring, Moonglade, Eastern Plaguelands, Zu’Gurub… But the tricky part with this was you can catch it only during the night and not same amount all the time. If you fished between 12am and 6am the only fish to drop was Nightfin. Sounds fun doesn’t it. It was! My favorite place to fish them was Hinterlands.

Level 59-60 elites which meant they dropped 17-20 silver each which was quite amazing amount back then. Also if you look at their loot list it’s mostly just grey items which were good for cashing at vendors. And since they’re elites not everyone could solo them and there was not much competition for them. Not my favorite place to grind money but a solid option if some other place was feeling too crowded.

I didn’t grind at Tyr’s Hand until rather late part of vanilla. All mobs are elites and many are ranged, lots of patrols and bunched up mobs. So as a druid it was a little bit difficult if you wanted to do it alone. But eventually my gear kicked up and I could do it. And they of course added the Moonkin form into game so I could actually take few hits. Money was pretty much the same as from giants in Winterspring but Scarlets also dropped Runecloth which was nice addition.

The main food source during Burning Crusade. These guys dropped Chunk o’ Basilisk which was needed for making Blackened Basilisk. There are other locations to get it besides Terokkar Forest but this was best of them by far. If you just followed the small streams or the northeastern cliff edge you would find lots and lots of them very close to each other. Very easy to farm and I did it a lot.

Later in the game I spent lots of time grinding at Northdale. Lots of ghosts around who drop Runecloth, Essence of Undeath and Invader’s Scourgestones which you could use for Argent Dawn reputation. Then there’s the water elementals who drop Essence of Water which I used for making Hide of the Wild to sell in auction house. Back then the droprate of essences was very very low so they fetch quite a price.

I’ve always thought the Timbermaw Furbolgs are kinda cool so I did a lot of rep grind for them, before they made it a bit easier and actually gave some repeatable quests. It took ages and I got past revered before the quests were put in. But I made some serious money while at it and damn it felt good when you finally hit exalted and turned in The Brokering of Peace and Magni yelled for all Ironforge to hear:

Above and beyond the call of duty indeed… the amount of time involved kinda creeps me out now when I think of it.

This was the number one grind spot in Burning Crusade. The place was jam packed with mobs dropping Mark of Sargeras, Fel Armament and Netherweave Cloth. This is where I grinded two characters to exalted with Aldor. I didn’t buy anything from auction house to speed up the reputation so I saved and earned a lot while doing it myself. Another good thing about this spot was the two elites patrolling in the area which cut down the amount of bots.

Best place to grind in vanilla. At least it was for me since I had skinning. Yetis are kinda funny.. they’re one of the two skinnable humanoids in game (in addition to worgen). And being humanoids they also drop money so double win for me. I made lots of gold by selling the Rugged Leather in auction house. Whenver I needed money without too much hassle or stress I just headed for Winterspring.

Holy crap these guys are the most awesome thing ever. When I was leveling through Un’Goro I didn’t get killed by them but I did get chased by them every now and then. And oh it was so hilarious to watch someone get stomped by them. At some point.. maybe level 56 or so I thought I am so going to try and kill one of these things on my own. It wasn’t that easy and not all Devilsaurs are the same.

When I got to level 60 it was time to start collecting money for epic mount. I had (tribal) leatherworking and skinning as professions and I had put a lot of effort in keeping the skill high. Often instead of leveling I paused for long times to skill up my leatherworking instead. So, I had profession high so I bought myself Pattern: Devilsaur Gauntlets and Pattern: Devilsaur Leggings. Then it was just a matter of lots of grinding and hopefully selling the products for good price.

I’m sure everyone’s been to Un’Goro so you know that Devilsaurs are pretty small in numbers. There was four spots where I sat and waited for them to walk by. Killing them wasn’t easy so I needed safe locations with lots of room to mess around without accidently running into other mobs. After a while it became fairly routine so the stress factor weared off and I actually became quite good in hunting them.

The biggest hazard for me was other players. I understand they might have meant well when they come rushing to my ‘aid’ and breaking my roots so the Devilsaur just charges and beats hell out of me. And every time I tried to explain why I need to do it alone they just went “lol you were going to die and I saved you lolz”. Sigh. Of course I was going to die because you freaking tried to kill me! So I just made a shout macro and spammed it every time I saw someone coming to ward them off. Sometimes it worked sometimes not.

It took forever but the items I crafted sold for 80-100g a piece which was insane amount of money back in those days. And for quite a while I seemed to have the monopoly on these items at the auction house so.. yay for me. Eventually the day finally came when I had collected the 1k gold I believe it was back then and bought Reins of the Swift Frostsaber. And I have Devilsaurs to thank for that.

Hm.. seems like I got a bit carried away on this last one. But they deserved it.

Couple days ago I went and made the biggest auction house purchase of my whole WoW career. 10k gold for Parrot Cage (Hyacinth Macaw). I’m pretty passionate pet collector so for me it was all worth it but there was a problem now since I was down to around 50 gold. Well obviously I’d have to do dailys a lot for a while to get back up where I don’t have to worry about money. But how much do I need to keep myself up to snuff on raids anyway. I have never really thought about it before and the answer was quite surprising.

The Essentials

1) Flasks & reagents

These are the things no serious raider goes without. Nobody. Flasking up once / hour gives a serious boost to whatever you’re doing. And the price? Well obviously everything depends what server you’re on. On my server the average price for 1 flask is 25-29g. Let’s say 30g tops.

Reagents? They cost so little I don’t even remember how much. Just keep a good stack with you at all times if your spells require them or you haven’t glyphed out of them.

2) Repair costs

This is where it gets trickier and obviously depends what type of armor you’re using. Is it a farm raid or wipetastic progress raid. Last Thursday I had a farm raid. I repaired before leaving Dalaran as I always do and went to Wintergrasp and did Firewatcher, then moved to ToC 25 and cleared it. Then we went to Onyxia 25 and did that. I didn’t die a single time during this and when I came back to Dalaran and went to repair I had lost durability worth ~3 gold. Wow.

Progress raids then? Well I can’t say I have really memorised how much but I’d think around 60 gold for one night is pretty close.

3) Food

First let’s think the health/mana food/water. There’s usually a mage around so 98% of time you won’t be using vendor bought food or water. And what if you were.. only time you’d be eating/drinking it is right before new pull after you’ve done buffing.

Buff food then. I know nowadays people slack with this when you can just take a bite from someone elses Fish Feast. Which by all means is fine but you still should have your own stuff as backup. Just like normal food it might sit there for months before you take a bite off it but it’s good to be prepared.

4) Health and mana potions

Another ‘when do I use this anyway’ category. I don’t know how much they cost in auction house.. not a clue. I’m still using the ones I’ve got as drops while questing or doing instances. Health potions I had not used hardly at all until having a go on hardmode Mimiron. So yee.. 1 boss in current content. Mana potions I’ve used more often but still very rarely. If I end up so low on mana I have to use them it’s probably because it was one of the longer fights, I had to combat res someone and give my Innervate away – probably to the person I ressed. But still the usage of these potions is so low I won’t have to buy or make more of them during this expansion if it stays the same.

5) Gear upgrades

Gems, enchants… armor kits. Once you’ve got your first proper raiding gear all the big money investments are probably gone. I don’t think many get huge number of upgrades in short amount of time. Let’s say 1 new item / week tops if even that. Last time I got something was… 20 days ago. And it was a necklace (without socket) so no additional expences required. So expences on your gear are so sporadic you can’t really count how much gold you need to keep up with them.

6) Luxury items

For me this is Potion of Speed, Potion of Wild Magic, Fish Feast, Runescroll of Fortitude and Drums of Forgotten Kings.

Fish Feast I use all the time because I think it’s nice you can provide stuff for your group with so little effort. And I do like fishing. Mostly anyway.

Potion of Speed and Potion of Wild Magic I have to buy from auction house and they’re both around 25g for 5. How often do I use them is another thing.. not very often. If it’s some hardmode fight they’re nice to have and give you some DPS boost but that doesn’t happen so often. I only have to restock maybe once a month.

Runescroll of Fortitude and Drums of Forgotten Kings are something I can make but what I don’t carry around with me. At least haven’t so far. But I do keep various crafting materials on my banker so should we ever miss a priest or paladin I don’t have to mess around with auction house or go grind mats.

What’s the damage, doctor?

Scheduled raids 3 nights / week, 1 of them is farm raid, 2 are progress/hardmode ones if signups permit. Farm raid is 2 hours because it just doesn’t take longer with current content… other two are 3 hours.

Flasks: 224g
Reagents: whatever
Repairs: 130g
Food: none
Potions: none
Rest: too sporadic to count

Grand total of 354g. With all the money falling from skies just by doing few dailys that amount of gold is nothing. I bought the pet 2 days ago and I’m already at 900g. Only things I’ve really done is some Argent Tournament dailys, skipping lancing ones and the TFA, and a little bit of questing at Borean Tundra.

Also about the flasks or anything for that matter.. if you do have the professions to provide you the only thing what’s really going to cost you is the repairs. I do have a herbalist and alchemist btw but I’m too lazy to grind. Actually I got every single profession covered on some character except jewelcrafting – but I have a miner so I can get the raw materials and have someone else craft for me. So technically I could be self-sufficient if I’d just want to but I’m too lazy for that… doing few dailys once a day or even every couple days feels like a snap when grinding mats is just a drag.

What did I even worry about.

1. Easy to level

One reason why I rolled a druid back in the days was because I read it is a good soloing class. And you know what.. it is. You start off a bit slow with only fraction of your abilities but as you gain levels it only gets easier. You can attack from range, stealth past enemies, heal yourself, travel fast in water and turn into bear form for extra durability. Prior to patch 3.2 and lowering the level required for mounts the travel form also was a nice addition to make your life easier. It’s not completely useless nowadays either though. Since you can use it even while in combat unlike normal mounts it provides means of escape and significant tactical advantage in PvP.

2. Versatility

Great thing about druid is that you can literally play any role; tank, melee dps, ranged dps and healing. There is no other class that can do all that. There was a time when only healing part was end game viable but that is long gone. If you just know your stuff any of these roles can be done well enough. Granted the DPS part is somewhat behind of the pure classes but not so far that you should feel bad about it.

3. You provide tons of buffs to others in your group

Many players might not like playing druid enough to do it themeselves but they will love you for playing one.

Basic things every druid has:

Gift of the Wild + Imp. Mark of the Wild
One of the best buffs in game. Personally I think it’s 2nd only to the paladin Blessing of Kings. And once they change how stats work in Cataclysm it is going to be even more amazing.

Innervate
Surely very welcome to any caster. If you don’t need it yourself there’s always someone who does.

Rebirth
Someone is bound to die… but have no fear.. you’ll be there to res him so he can die again. Err.. no it came out right I think. Just don’t die yourself.

Thorns
Used on tanks but how much it contributes is another thing. Last I checked tanks haven’t had any problems generating aggro. Oh well.. it’s there anyway.

Balance druid:

Moonkin Aura + Imp. Moonkin Form
Everyone loves to crit. And with increased haste maybe crit even sooner?

Improved Faerie Fire
Getting the hit cap is annoying task and every little bit of hit you can leave out from your gear is more stuff invested on DPS.

Earth and Moon
Simply amazing increase to your caster DPS.

Restoration druid:

Tree of Life
Other healers love to heal for more and rest love to receive more heals. Win win all the way.

Feral druid:

Leader of the Pack + Imp. Leader of the Pack
Melee loves to crit too. And free heals? Wehey.

Quick note about these… my experience about Feral and Resto is very limited so if I am missing something please feel free to correct me on comments.

4. Easy to learn but challenging to master

When you look at the basics on any guide it’s pretty obvious there isn’t much to playing a druid. However from experience I have to say I’ve bumped into more medium level players than high end. Not really sure why… and yes I can be totally wrong here. This is just the impression I’ve got. You can read and pick up the basics in 5 minutes but I guess executing it is still difficult. Plan is only as good as person seeing it through.

5. Rich lore and representation

If you’re into lore there’s bucketloads of it in WoWWiki and I could make a whole post or two from it so let’s leave it to that.. for now. Representation? In addition to player controlled ones you can bump into druids just about anywhere. Do quests for them and even grind reputation for them. We even got our own zone in Moonglade and the holiday event Lunar Festival is hosted by druids. Remember Silithus back at the very late vanilla? Druids. Who did you have to do stuff with in order to repair close to Serpentshrine Cavern? Druids. Who set forth the killing blow on Archimonde before he could steal the power of Nordrassil and use it against whole Azeroth? Malfurion Stormrage, and yes he was, is, a druid.

6. Interesting class quests

It’s shame you do not have to do them anymore because they’re very well done. Even the infamous Trial of the Sea Lion. Yes it sent you to literally to other side of the world but man what an adventure it was back in the days. Personally I had never been to Westfall or anywhere near it until I got this. Traveling there really showed me the world. And almost made me drown when I chose to swim from Wetlands instead of walking… good times.

In Burning Crusade we got the quest for Swift Flight Form which was the best and the most epic quest I’ve ever done. You got to fight all these bosses and really use your abilities to the fullest if you wanted to be able to solo them. Then you ended it all with a highlight in Sethekk Halls. Another memorable thing at least for me was the tauren woman in Nagrand. She was so nice.

7. You get to stand out from other druids

Big problem with gear nowadays is that eventually everyone will look same. With the shapeshift forms changing based on your hair/skin color at least you can get some diversity. For now this is only treat of the ferals but eventually balance and resto will get their share too. Let’s just hope it’s sooner than later. At least the poor resto druids could really use a makeover.

8. More /dance moves than any other class

Balance and resto druids get 4 and feral 3. Counted cat and travel form only as one since it’s the same thing. Only other class getting more than 1 is shaman.

9. We’re all family here

This is interesting social bit what I should talk about in more detail someday. There seems to be some sort of honor among druids thing going on with druids of opposite factions. At least I’ve got tons of lovely emotes from Horde druids every now and then. Maybe all this Horde vs. Alliance rubbish doesn’t apply, at least so heavily, on druids. How can you fight against each other when the universe is going to hell in a hand basket. Rubbish.

10. Good gear availability

In theory anyway. Feral druid shares loot with rogues, balance and resto with each other. Mostly the itemization is just poor at least for a balance druid and makes you turn to cloth. But in all fairness there’s always few really nice non-set items that pop with new content. Like Boots of the Unreleting Storm and Leggings of the Awakening from ToC 25 and their heroic versions.