Hey Everyone! Just thought I would pop in and tell you that I'm working on a new project for the web site, I'm not going to give out too many details quite yet but just know I think its going to be really cool and really helpful and I hope that you guys will think the same! It really is a project though and its taking me quite a while to make, I will try to have it up as soon as possible though so keep an eye out for it and I will be sure to post it up here as soon as I'm done.

Hey Everyone! I wanted to come on and apologize for the lack of posting the past week, I've been very busy with the holidays, and router problems (which I will explain below, just for fun, don't read if you don't want to). Because of the holidays my guild has also cut lots of raiding for this week, so I haven't been on much except for my daily frost badge run. I promise things will be back to normal by the beginning of the new year.

So as for my router problems, I was using a Netgear router and all of a sudden one day it decides to put a password on, just randomly without me knowing. So I call Netgear to see if they can help me get into it since I didn't know the password it put on itself. When I call netgear they ask for the serial number on the router and I give it to them, and they proceed to tell me that they can not help me because my router that I've been using since July, wasn't mine. I bought this router from staples brand new I had the box and receipt sitting right next to me, I tried to tell him this and he still wouldn't help me! After this point I got pretty angry as I'm sure you can understand, after a bit of yelling I ask to speak to his manager and he says to me, "We can no longer help you in this office." and hangs up on me! Unfortunately I had not gotten his name and could not call back and complain about it. So the next day I went down to staples again, told them what happened, they let me return the netgear router and have a $100 credit towards a new router, which I chose Linksys. But honestly can you believe they said that to me on the phone? HORRIBLE customer service, and I will never be buying from them again.

Happy Holidays to all my viewers. I wanted to let you all know how much you all mean to me, I couldn't do this without you. Before you all go on vacation for the holiday, keep this in mind. Holidays are a prime time for hackers, because they know that people are going on vacation for the holidays, and by the time you get back the damage is already done and there is NOTHING you can do about it. So take some precautions before you head out, the best thing you can do for your account is to get an Authenticator. Here is a link to where I bought mine, they are very cheap and it makes it a billion times harder, nearly impossible even, for a hacker to get into your account. Another thing you could try is to get blizzard to completely shut down your account until you get back from vacation, meaning no one can get into your account until you reactivate it, this is just a temporary fix and I suggest you go with the authenticator, but they both work.

On a happier note, I want to wish you all a Happy Holiday whatever it may be, be safe, be responsible, and have fun =)

On 12/18/09 we finally downed the last boss unlocked so far in 10 man ICC. I would have to say that the only hard bosses out of the four were Lady Deathwhisper, and Deathbringer Saurfang. The gunship battle was probably the easiest of them all.

As for advice for these fights that I would give fellow resto druids. In the Lord Marrowgar fight the Tanks take a great deal of damage, make sure you keep as many HoTs on both of them as you can during the first phase. Also, it is possible for a healer to stand on top of Marrowgar and not have to worry about dodging the flames, you must make sure that you are not in front of Marrowgar though or you will help take the damage with the tanks, you must be either on top of him or slightly behind him with the melee dps. Though this is very handy and convenient I don't suggest all the healers stack here, in fact I would only suggest that the Primary Tank healer stands here because you don't want to be out of range if some of the ranged dps needs heals.

During the Lady Deathwhisper fight you just have to set out raid heals keep rejuvenation and wild growth up, the stuff you always want to be doing. The only thing you will want to look out for are the deformed adds, the reanimated adds, and the empowered adds, when they come out they will deal a great amount of damage and you will have to be ready to work a little harder.

The Gunship Battle I would have to say was the easiest of the 4 fights. There are a few things druids need to know about this fight however. First of all, using your jetpack WILL take you out of your tree form, and any other form that you may be in, so you will either have to quickly switch back to tree form when you land on the other ship, or you could do what our raid group did and just assign a different healer to jump across to the other ship. Also I decided to stand on the edge of the ship and had the tank that jumped over come slightly closer to the edge of their ship as well, thus I was able to assist in healing that way without switching ships. I was a little worried being so close to the edge at first, however there is nothing that is going to push you off unless you walk off yourself, so don't worry about it. One more thing to realize and to make sure that your raid realizes, is that the thing that will end up doing the most damage is the rockets they shoot over to your ship, but only if people don't move out of the way of them. You can easily tell where these rockets are going to hit because there will be runes on the ground.

The Deathbringer Saurfang encounter was a difficult one, I'm assuming you already know the fight and so i won't have to mention that this entire time I was watching to make sure I was making sure to keep a 11 yard range between me and any other players. When the adds came up we would have 1 ranged dps with a macro to mark one of the adds, I would then wait till the other unmarked add was far enough away from the tank that the tank would not pick up agro and i would then use Entangling Roots and that would hold the second add until the ranged was done with the first one. This becomes more difficult after he gets below 30% heals and he starts attacking much quicker, heals will need to step it up after this point. However I still managed to root the unmarked add then quickly switch back to tree form and continue healing.

I was really hoping that [Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff] would drop off Deathbringer Saurfang, however it didn't. In fact, nothing rest-druid even dropped this week! Oh well, there is always next week though right? Well I'm going to be moving on to the 25 man version of it now and hoping for [Greatcloak of the Turned Champion] to drop, the cloak I'm using right now is very very out of date, it would be nice to get a new one.

You hear all over the place that Druids are Raid healers not Tank healers, which I do not agree with. I think we should change the term to Druids are better suited Raid healers then tank healers. Thanks to our AoE heal over time spell wild growth and our many instant cast HoT spells, we can cover lots of raid members at once. However if given a situation where a druid would need to keep a Tank alive they would be more then capable, all we would need to do is make sure to keep all our HoTs on them and to refresh them, throw out Nourish when needed, and when things get intense use swiftmend. Now if you were to be a Tank healer there are a few talents you would like to make sure you speck'ed into but they are not 100% necessary.

So in conclusion, it is not that Druids can not be tank healers because we are more then capable of keeping a tank alive, we just maximize our healing abilities more when we are healing the raid.

Here is a list of the new druid items, if there is a ** next to the item you can hover over it to see the heroic version of the item. I have only put the links to items for the bosses who are out so far because I can not find a consistent drop list of the other bosses yet. So, rather then confuse everyone I will just update it when that time comes.

I definitely noticed the difference since the change to Gift of the Earthmother, so I decided to regem and see how that worked. Previous to this patch the majority of my gems were the Runed Cardinal Ruby (+12 Spell power), so I had powerful HoTs and had macro'd Innervate to target and cast on me when I needed it. This worked out well, however, now that my haste was dropped so low I decided to put some Reckless Ametrine (+ 12 Spell Power and + 10 Haste Rating) gems into all my yellow gem sockets. This did get me back up to a 1 second global cool down however I lost quite a bit of spell power. So I decided toresearch other ways to increase my haste. After looking into my talent tree I decided to spec into Celestial Focus. Yes this required me to go farther down into the balance tree which means a few less points in the restoration tree but the 3% increased haste was definitely worth it. I came up with the simple equation of

Total Haste + (Total Haste * .03)

with Total Haste being the Haste I had after I put my Runed Cardinal Ruby's back, to calculate how many spell power gems I could put back and still keep my nice 1 second global cool down. This equation of course will only work if you use it before you spec into the Celestial Focus Talent.

After testing out this glyph I believe that it can definitely be a very nice thing to have, it mostly depends on what you heal the most. If you primarily heal 10 man raids and 5 man dungeons, I would definitely suggest it! If you generally do the 25 man dungeons then I would suggest you use the Glyph of Rejuvenation instead. If you want to be able to heal your best in both situations, you can always dual spec, 1 for the 10 man and 5 man raids, and one for the 25 man raids. This would also mean that you can make some changes in your talent tree to help you out either way as well.

The Fall of the Lich King Patch (Patch 3.3) went live on 12/08/2009 at about noon PST. I got in pretty quickly and decided to run my random dungeon to get my 2 emblems of frost. I was DC'd right as we killed the last boss in Old Kingdom. Now I can't seem to load into the game again. It seems many people are having the same problem as me, there is a huge forum about it in on the WoW forums. I made a post and am simply waiting for blizzard to resolve the issue. So I thought, why not take the time to write a new article.

First of all as with every patch your add-ons will be turned off and out of date, so what you need to do is go online and download the new versions which should say they are compatible with patch 3.3 or if you have curse client you can just open it up and update them on that. There is also one more option you could do. Click the add-ons button in your character log in screen and check the force out of date add-ons button. The problem with doing that is they can be pretty buggy and you might get lots of error messages if they aren't the up to date version.

Here is a condensed version of the Patch 3.3 notes for the Trees:

3 New 5-Man Dungeons

New Icecrown Citadel Raid

New Cross-Realm Looking For Group system

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

Tranquility: The cool down on this spell has been reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.

Gift of the Earthmother: Redesigned. This talent now increases spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10% and reduces the base global cool down of Lifebloom by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of its previous effects.

Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation: This glyph allows for the druid’s haste to reduce the time between the periodic healing effects of Rejuvenation.

Rejuvenation: Druids will no longer get a more powerful spell error message when attempting to overwrite a Rejuvenation they cast.

Enchants: Head and Shoulder enchants still require reputation to buy, however they are now Bind on Account.

Ok so I am now coming to you at the end of Patch 3.3 Day. Downed all the new heroics farmed lots of Heroics with my guild to help gear people. And at the end of Halls of Reflection the last of the 3 new 5 man Heroics, we were bugged so we couldn't get to our loot. Which sucked we would DC on the first step of the flying boat every time we tried to run up it. That kinda pissed us off but whatever you know. So with the triumph badges I believe there is only 1 more thing that i could get, and that's the head piece that costs 75 emblems. Everything else I already had pre patch, I know lame right but whatever.

Looking forward to getting into the new IC raid content!!!

So I was in a raid the other day and someone mentioned that they were top heals in their guild. So i asked them what made them "the best". They said that they were always top of the healing charts for their raids. This gave me an idea for something to write about.

Lets start by talking about DPS (Damage Per Second). The cool thing about DPS is that you can always dps your heart out, up until the point when your target dies. There for you can easily measure it using an average of how much damage you put out per second. There are of course some exceptions to this. Some Bosses require you to switch targets, move, or stop dps momentarily. During fights like that your dps is bound to go down.

As for HPS (Heals Per Second), like with DPS it measures how much healing you are putting out per second. The reason that this is not a reliable number to judge a healer on is, the amount of heals you have to put out is based on how much damage the raid is taking. A great example would be Onyxia's Lair, in this fight you have 3 phases. During the first phase the tank should be pretty much the only person taking damage, therefore you don't need as many heals. Then when you begin the second phase things change, she goes up into the air and first of all you get the whelps coming out. When everyone is AoE'ing them down it is easy for a dps to pull agro off a couple, so they would need a heal. Then there are the guardians blast nova's. Preferably everyone would be away from the guardian when this happens but we all know that that does not always happen, so you have to give heals to them. More adds will be coming out of the caves so that means another tank to heal and that tank doesn't always get all the whelps, some get on the dps and healers so then you have to throw heals to them as well. The Deep Breaths shouldn't deal too much damage if everyone is against the wall but they do deal some damage so that's more healing. So lots of healing during the second phase, however if you look at your HPS during this fight you won't see it very high because during the first phase, you didn't have to heal very much. Then there are some fights like the Twins in ToC where the orbs make it so pretty much everyone is taking damage the whole fight, therefore your Heals should be pretty high in that fight

So In Conclusion DPS and HPS are clearly not the same thing and You can not judge your, or anyone else's, Heals on HPS.

I can't be too sure on how i feel about this yet because obviously i haven't played around with it yet. The new glyph I guess could be cool. however if your trying to blanket rejuvenation on the party this will reduce the duration of your rejuvenation on the target so you can't have it on as many people. Which i suppose wouldn't be TOO much of a problem in a 10 man raid but if you are in a 25 man raid trying to blanket rejuvenation, you don't want it sped up. Not to mention that they already are reducing it from an 18 second duration to a 15 second cool down without the Glyph. However if you look down at the T-10 set bonus, if your rejuvenation is jumping around a lot maybe a little quicker ticking wouldn't be such a bad thing right? In fact it could make it a must have glyph! I'm going to have to play around with it a bit when it comes out.

From the change to Gift of the Earthmother talent has the potential to be a very drastic change, It still gives us somewhat of a cool down for the Lifebloom skill, however I use Rejuvenation and Wild growth a lot more then I use Lifebloom. It may look like we will be going from stacking crit like with the T9 Set to get more out of your rejuvination crits, to Stacking Haste with the T 10 set so that we can keep the nice short global cool down.

The new T10 relic will obviously be an improvement because its basically 256 free spell power, up from 234 with the T9 Idol.

As for the Changes to Tranquility, I find it a very un useful spell. I never use it. It would be a great spell if it healed everyone in the area that's in your raid but it only heals the people in your immediate party. When raiding you generally have to keep heals on the entire raid and not just your party

And the reduced cool down of rebirth, ummmm..... HELL YA that will be useful

First of all one add on every Raider should have not just the Healers would be DBM (Deadly Boss Mods). It alerts you when Bosses are doing signature moves, when you get de buffs that have to be taken care of, can in some cases predict a bosses next move so you can be ready for it, and many more features valuable to raiding

Healbot is one ad don that I live by. It allows for you to cast your heals with simple 1 click of the mouse. Not to mention it comes in handy when trying to buff everyone up especially if you generally use thorns. It also displays which HoTs (Heal over Time Spells) are on each party member so you know who has what of yours and exactly when it runs out.

Recount is always a nice add on to have, however don't judge your Healing based on it. HPS (Heals Per Second) is not the same as DPS (Damage Per Second) with healing, your HPS depends on how much damage is being taken by the rest of the raid, and how many healers you have in the raid.

You should also keep in mind when downloading add-ons that every add on that you download is that much more your computer has to run. which could slow down your speed. Many Top-End Raiding guilds don't allow their members to have any add-ons that are not essential. It may seem like not a big deal but small things add up.