On big farewells:

Last night, just before the servers went down, Kirin Tor-H got together a bunch of trees, and started dancing the night away. It started over at the north bank in Dalaran, but eventually, we moved it all over to the fountain in the middle. I give you this screenshot:

Obviously you should click to embiggen, but yeah, that's Bloodlusted trees, all the way around the fountain, both Alliance and Horde, popping one final Tranquility before we go poof.

Now, again, I should state for the record that as far as changes go, I am neutral about this. Yes, it's rotten brocolli. At the same time, where is our Tree Form armor increase? They said they were going to roll the bonuses from Tree of Life into the spec, but unless they decided they were going to give a flat 150% armor boost to all pieces of spell leather, I don't see it anywhere.

Here's to a new era.

Here's to hoping they don't f&$! it all up.

-BTC

On terrible puns:

Okay, I know that nobody out there reads my blog, but I'm going to pimp this anyhow:

Yes, I love terrible puns. Yes, I also love the Raid Warning podcast. But the class roundtable special podcasts are particularly awesome, and you should all totally go listen when it goes down October 12th.

-BTC

On downtime:

Slooooooow week out here in BTC-land.

With all the trying to 8-man the Jarraxus for the raid weekly, ('FLESH TROMBONE!' Now you won't be able to hear it otherwise. You're welcome.) the regular main tank having prior engagements both this week and the next, and out usually top-DPS DK having to switch to the Tankadin alt to fill in instead, we did not get to the Frost quarter... shame, too, because I really was looking forward to taking down Sindragosa. Hopefully, next week things will be ironed out between me and my temporary-co-tank, and we will be able to take her down. (ASDFJAKSDFJAKSDFALSJ HATE HER SO MUCH.)

Had a chance to take my Cat-based PVP build into ICC25... managed to top out at 8k DPS according to Recount on Saurfang.... I think I screwed up somewhere. I'll get another chance to try it again this coming Monday, but I think the raid leader will want me back on tanking duties. We'll see!

PVP post is still forthcoming, although it appears that I'm being recalled back to Resto duties... not so sure I want to go back, but I am entertaining the notion.

If I Had To Write Another Blog: Healing Edition

I like healing.

And yes, if I had to write another blog, I would write a healing blog. You may have seen the kind of criticism that sites like World of Matticus get, but when it all comes down to it, I like healing, and people like it when I heal. It is very rare when I play a game where I *don't* do some form of healing.

It's my stated goal to have one of each flavor of healer, at some point. I already have a Shaman, which I've mothballed due to my dislike of everything degenerating into Chain Heal spam when the going gets rough. I have my BearTreeCat, which I love, even despite the massive overheal numbers. I have my priest, which I am considering mothballing for now, because I just can't stand doing any low-level content, unless it's for my Druid's Loremaster achievement. The Paladin healer won't come until Cataclysm, though, because I can't stand Blood Elves. Which means yes, I do intend to make it some flavor of either Holycow or Retbull. (Yes, those jokes are old. No, I'm not going to stop using them.)

But I like healing. It's why I originally started this blog, alongside my Tanking. DPS didn't come until much later.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

-BearTreeCat

Finally, some sanity.

I've expressed respect and admiration for Allison Robert of Wow.com to others before, but she's recently written an article that that makes me breathe a sigh of relief that reassures me that yes, Virginia, there are people who are looking at the Tree of Life forms rationally, and don't need to be talked down from the ledge*. It's a good article that expresses pretty much how I feel about what they're doing as well, except that while we both play female tauren**, the casting animations don't matter to me one bit.

-BearTreeCat

*Ouch. Bad turn of phrase. I just watched the first episode of the latest season of House.
**I was not about to roll a character that liberally scratches its ass every five seconds. The exasperated sigh works much better, especially given the nicknames that get thrown around the poor girl's, and, by extension, my direction. "Steak", usually. But "Bear butt" is a close second.

HA!

Just a month in and bearly a fistful of blog posts later, I have to change my blog name. Why? Because I started Kitty DPSing. You see, at first, I didn't *want* to Cat DPS at all. I wanted to be the renegade, the rebel, the maverick! I wanted to make a full-on bear tank spec, with no regard for cat DPSing at all, the hybrid nature of Druids be damned!

Hand me that bottle of Tabasco, will you? This foot is a bit bland.

Back when I started playing my Druid, it was because my guild had hit GUILD DRAMA, and we'd lost a rogue DPS and our warrior tank. Because of this, raiding was pretty much out the window because we only *had* 10 people, and until our raid leader found someone to replace the two slots we weren't going anywhere. So we had a month of downtime, and I was getting more and more disillusioned with my Shaman. I'd originally wanted to make her an Elesham for raiding, But like any good Trekkie, I held to Spock's famous words, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," and converted her into a Restosham. But something rubbed me the wrong way about it. As time went on, I found myself growing to rely more and more and more on Chain Heal spam to heal my raids. And that was getting seriously boring for me, just mashing the same button over and over again. I've had many arguments with my Discipline priest raid leader over this. I think she still considers me a moron for giving up such a great spell. But I hated it. My line of thinking was that when that one spell becomes the *only* thing you do, something needs to change. So I went looking for a new healer to make. Now since, my favorite Shaman healing spell is Riptide, I naturally started looking at the most HoT-centric healer I could find, the Restoration Druid. And so I bought some heirlooms, and started to level.

Along the way, we discussed a number of things in guild chat. We also recruited friends from other servers to help us. In the end, it was concluded that if I were to go Bear with my druid, we could source another Resto Shaman from our alliance guild and, along with a guildie's roommate, we would be 10-man ready once again. This wasn't really a problem for me, since I was absolutely loving being a bear. A Repurposed Lava Dredger enchanted with Crusader, with a Darkmoon Card: Heroism in one trinket slot, a Mark of Conquest in the other slot, and Improved Leader of the Pack meant I could get away with all kinds of stupid antics overpulling and still get away, alive.

So I sped towards 80 blindingly fast, and geared myself up. Heck, the Restoration offspec that I originally wanted was rapidly left by the wayside, untouched from levels 40 to 80.

Now, since I was gearing a pure Bear tank, this required me to spec and gear in a certain way. All gems? +30 Stamina gems, except for one Nightmare Tear! Forget Improved Mangle, I gotta have Bash down to thirty seconds! Shredding Attacks? Who needs a reduced Lacerate energy cost, those points are going to go into 5/5 Furor instead. I want instant rage when I shift! And.... I kind of have one point left over. Eh, let's reduce shapeshifting mana costs and drop it into King of the Jungle. And I'll get a small 5% damage boost when I pop Enrage, too.

And off we went. We went through all of Ulduar 10-man and ToC 10-man, and I blissfully upgraded my gear as we went along. But as we went along, there weren't always fights that needed two tanks. Or four healers. So as to actually be contributing and pulling my weight during those one-tank fights, I started shifting into cat and whacking things, throwing down 5-point Rips before shifting back to refresh Lacerate, and struggling to even do that, with only 1/3 King of the Jungle. I even started to gem my new gear with a mix of red and blue gems, slowly inching along towards hybridism. But I still resisted, putting myself as a tank first, and using cat to help the raid burn things down faster.

And then T10 came along. If you've been playing for quite some time, you know the four-piece bonus by heart now. That was pretty much the last straw I needed to finally respec. As soon as I was able to buy an Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder off the auction house, I bought my T10 pants, and then respecced from 5/5 Furor and 1/3 KotJ into the more mainstream 3/5 Furor and 3/3 KotJ.

Which brings us to the last two weeks. My guild has been running heroic 5-mans a lot, lately. Several of us have gotten freshly-80 alts. A veritable DKpalooza, really. One of our hunters has been picking up tanking on his DK, and we've been having him Blood tank instances to practice. Our main tank's DK finally hit 80 as well, so she's feeling out Unholy DPS. And since I wasn't needed to tank, and we had healing in various forms, ranging from the aforementioned guild alliance Restosham, picking up Elemental gear for his long-neglected DPS set, to another hunter's trying out her Retadin's Holy spec.... I started DPSing as well.

And I've been liking it so far. It's only in the past week or so that I decided that I was going to embrace all three roles, Tanking, Healing, and DPS fully. So that's my story. That's going to be the focus of this blog. There are going to be Druid blogs left and right. There are going to be dozens of Feral blogs, both Bear and Cat. There will be Restoration blogs as well. But this is going to be the blog that focuses on the druid (population: me!) that wants to do all three roles with one character, and never wants to roll another alt to slog from 1 to 80 and Loremaster AGAIN.

Welcome to Bear-y Leafy Kitty, folks.

-BearTreeCat

On Glyphs: Tree Edition

Hey, the blog *is* called Bear-y Leafy, y'know.

The biggest reason why I'm tackling this topic now, is because I recently had a very abrupt and severe jolt when I upgraded from 4pT9 to 2pT10. It was a fairly easy thing to do, since for some bloody reason, I managed to get into two VoAs without a single Tree, nay, a single druid in sight. So where do the Lasherweave Gauntlets and the Sanctified Lasherweave Legplates go? Yeah, me. So now I'm rocking 3pT10 for my tanking set, and 2pT10 for my healyset.

Or was, up until Tuesday.

The weekly raid was Malygos, and, since I usually crank out the HoTs.... my numbers sucked. I mean, they REALLY sucked. Malygos phase 1 is usually heaven for Trees, just stand in place, and throw instant heals. Whirlwind? Peh, just HoT everything, and by the time everyone lands, everyone is pretty much at or close to full HP. Phase 2? Breath? What breath? But the other healer pulled me aside and told me my numbers were stinking, and so I re-equipped the T9 gloves in the meantime. It's obvious that I'm going to need to make some adjustments if I want to keep my raidgroup up on its feet. And I hate the feeling that I might be the one responsible for the group wiping.

So here's my current setup: I've got Glyph of Swiftmend, Glyph of Nourish, and Glyph of Wild Growth.

Swiftmend is almost required. There's nothing worse than gobbling valuable HoTs when you try to give someone a shot in the arm.

Nourish, I am actually considering dropping, since I don't do much tank healing. Most of the time, it's just the strict 5 Rejuvenates - 1 Wild Growth rotation for me.

Wild Growth is also a candidate for being dropped as well. Ish. It's impact is difficult to gauge, given that you may not always find the fifth or sixth target when dropping it, especially either in 10-man content, or in fights where everyone has to spread out, a la Deathbringer.

If I want to roll with the 2pT10 bonus, maybe I'll have to swap either Nourish or Wild Growth out for Rapid Rejuvenation or Rejuvenation, but probably Rapid Rejuvenation, since that effect is useful no matter what level of HP the target is at.
Now, Wild Growth in and of itself might not always connect with every single HoT,