Back in action!

A funny thing happened on the way to the blog post... Life, mostly. I got bogged down with baby stuff and then Cataclysm dropped and then the holidays hit me and now we're focused on raiding and, well, I kept putting things off. I'm good at that.

Anyway, I'm back now :).

Mostly I'm back because I find myself having things to say again. I'm getting to actually play with the new mechanics and talents and that feels a lot better (and more useful) than just speculating about them. And we've got a new patch coming up that's going to change things yet again! Whee.

Mana

I'm not as bad off as I thought I'd be. Or rather I'm not as bad off as I was when we started raiding. It took the hubby (pally tank) and I about three days to hit 85. My mother (saint that she is) came up the week the xpac hit and babysat for us so we could pretty much play non-stop. Unfortunately, the baby still requires a lot of attention from me, so it wasn't as constant as it could have been. In the meantime, we sort of fell behind the gear curve. By the time the guild started raiding that next Monday (about a month ahead of what I thought we would be!), I still hadn't even gotten into my first heroic dungeon.

It felt horrible. Just absolutely horrible. I was OOM after Innervate, Mana Tide, and a pot and there was literally nothing else I could do to gain mana besides sit there. I felt crushed and useless. But gear fixes many things.

Since then I've enchanted, gemmed, and reforged for a lot of spirit, run a number of heroic dungeons, and picked up a lot of epic gear from raids. And I feel pretty good about it, overall. Last night we downed Halfus Wyrmbreaker and I ended the fight at almost full mana (in large part because of ToL). I'm getting out of my mana dry spell and I'll probably ease up on the spirit scale. Throughput will start being more important now that I've got the hang of how the fights work and I think on the later bosses in the zones it won't be as big a deal to be nearly OOM at the end of a fight.

Tree of Life

I miss it. Mostly it's the aesthetics of it (I have the glyph for the old form), but I really identified with being a "tree" and having to spend most of my time as a boring old nelf is a little depressing. I realize that Blizz had sort of designed themselves into a corner. Tree form didn't do anything but make us on-par healers with the other three healing classes and a lot of those bonuses could just as easily be rolled into our Restoration talents, and most of them have been. I just wish the form itself could have been repurposed in a better way than as a cooldown. I want to be a tree again. It's hard to find myself in raids now :P.

On the other hand, I have had a lot of fun learning how to use the ToL cooldown. I can juggle two lifebloom stacks fairly well most of the time and it really does save a LOT of mana. On our first Halfus Wyrmbreaker kill (back before Christmas when our gear was just so-so) I managed it for the first time for most of the duration of the fight. It saved so much mana through Omen of Clarity procs that I had more than half mana by the end of the fight, which was a real feat at the time. Now I just have to figure out how to work it into various fights rather than just popping it randomly.

Overall I miss the old form. I would give anything (including the new cooldown) to get it back. Not that I don't like the new cooldown mechanic, but I feel like the essence of my healer identity has sort of fallen away.

Patch 4.0.6

So lots of changes are coming to trees in this next patch, a lot of them nerfs. The nerf to Mana Tide will hit us (but since I didn't have any on-use spirit trinkets, it won't be so bad) and the change to Omen of Clarity will, too. The change where multiple stacks of Lifebloom can no longer be maintained sorta sucks. I enjoyed the challenge of that mechanic, because it's not one you can just step into. We're getting a mana cost reduction to Rejuv and some changes to make Regrowth more attractive, so that's a nice step in the direction of making us HoT-centric healers again. I don't think I've cast Healing Touch so much since vanilla :P.

I have to admit that I haven't been taking advantage of Nature's Grace. The increased cast speed is awesome, but I just haven't been casting Regrowth that much. Making it so that the spell also refreshes Lifebloom stacks means I'll have more of a reason to use it on Omen of Clarity procs. Speaking of Omen of Clarity, I've seen the numbers and while I agree that we will be getting fewer procs (and thusly less theoretical mana regen), I also have a lot of procs go unused. And since my most constant HoT has been Lifebloom anyway, I think I'll still be getting my fair share of OOC hits. Reducing the mana cost of Rejuv and giving us a cast speed buff on Nourish when there's three of them up, making Regrowth also refresh Lifebloom, and the change to Omen will, I think, give trees a lot more casting options. I like having somewhat complex mechanics. I think Swiftmend is an amazingly fun spell, and coupling that with our only instant-cast that takes advantage of Omen of Clarity means that I really think about it before I cast it. Now I'll also be weaving Rejuvs in to get faster casts of Nourish and throwing Regrowths out for very fast tank heals that will also take advantage of my mastery (which is also getting a buff).

I think the biggest disappointment for me is the loss of the multi-stack maintenance mechanic on Lifebloom. It's a complicated (again, a plus for me) thing to keep track of and do right. I feel like I've really accomplished something when I do so. But not everybody does like and not everybody can or wants to do that, which is why Blizz is not making it an option anymore. Otherwise they'd have to design encounters and mana regen around tree druids being able to do so, and that's sorta unfair. Still, I like the concept and I wish they could implement it in some other way.

Not your mama's expansion

I have been feeling really down in the dumps this whole xpac so far. And I can totally see why but there's also very little I can do. 

I have a baby. I love her dearly. She's walking and starting to babble a lot. She can pick things up and hand them to me and she smiles almost constantly and she's a tremendous torment to our dog, which is hilarious. But she also requires my constant attention. I knew this was coming and I accept it as part of parenting. When she goes to school, I'll have a little more time to myself. But right now it's all her, all the time. 

So when I do finally get to sit down and play WoW in the evenings, I'm behind. Most days I don't get a chance to do a daily heroic. She naps two to three times a day for an hour or so each, but I can't reliably finish a heroic in that time frame, so I refrain. I farm herbs or archeology or quest. I'm not where I was, gear-wise, at this point in Wrath. I'm desperately trying to get either Darkmoon Card: Tsunami or Tyrande's Favorite Doll. One requires lots of archeology, one requires lots of herbing. Both require a lot of luck. But for the card, I can influence luck with cash.

I think my point is that I want to play more and I can't. I want to farm for the things I want and need, but I can't. I want to improve my gear outside of raids, but I can't to the extent that I want to. I am frustrated by this both because I'm being denied something that I want and because I'm wanting something that, if I were to indulge, would potentially harm my child. Leaving a 10-month-old relatively unsupervised in the house is going to cause damage to the things in it and maybe to the little girl, depending on what she gets into. And I don't want that.

My best coping mechanism so far is to back off. I don't play WoW every time she takes a nap because it just reinforces my unhappiness. I go to raids and I don't compare gear with other healers (fortunately I'm the only tree or this would be much worse :P). I do my best and we're succeeding. Or at least not failing because of a lack of gear on my part.

I don't think I was ever HARD CORE, but I was certainly a lot less casual than I am now. And I definitely feel that. I have to learn to deal with that and it's a struggle. I have more boundaries than I did before. But it's my hope that I'm still as good a player as I used to be. Because I really believe skill can make up for a lack of gear and I intend to prove it.