So, the healing forums have been having a pretty big discussion lately (over the last few weeks) about how much mana management should matter in Cataclysm, and how spell choice plays into managing mana.

As someone who survived healing from the early days through now, I remember having to make more… intelligent decisions about what heals to use when mana was a limited resource.

I remember the days of using down-ranked Healing Touches weaved between other spells. In Burning Crusade, we didn’t ..read the full article

Happy Blogiversary to me!

A little over a year ago, I decided to start a blog. A year ago today was when my boyfriend finished setting it up and I posted my very first posts! The first day, I posted 4 mini-posts, mostly analyzing the 3.1 PTR patch note changes. This also means that I have been in my current guild, Conspiracy, for over a year!

Since I was already pretty well known amongst druids from my long time posting (& stickied ..read the full article

So, there has been some chatter around the internet amongst bloggers about how much they write about their guilds. Since I started out as a fairly prominent druid community member before I started blogging, I didn’t see the point in trying to hide my in-game identity – instead, I capitalized on the readership I already had when I started the blog (by re-posting, cross-linking between my stickied guides & here). Since my forum identity also comes with an armory profile ..read the full article

So, they announced more details about their plan for Cataclysm gear, which has set off a posting frenzy across the WOW community.

Most of it was stuff we already knew. The summary is that they expect bear & cats to share gear, while they expect resto & moonkin to share gear. This sounds great in theory, but is likely going to cause problems in the long run, and it’s going to take months of Beta testing everything to get all the ..read the full article

Based on request, here’s what the basics of the Moonkin’s Eclipse rotation looks like with pictures. This is the rotation for a level 80 moonkin doing single-target damage to a raid/instance boss. This is updated for the 3.3.3 content patch for Wrath of the Lich King. For more info on the basics of moonkin, please see my previous “how to moonkin raid PvE” post here.

First, lets look at Murmur’s Recommended rotation from the Balance 101 thread: I’ll copy & paste ..read the full article

So, you just hit 80 and want to be a moonkin raider? Great! Lets get started.

First, you have to be aware of how many great resources there are for new moonkin players, such as the Balance 101 guide on WoW.com. Murmur’s guide covers a lot more than what I’m going to talk about here, and he covers it in greater detail. I am also including lots of links in this post to places where other people explained things, so if ..read the full article

There were 2 questions relevant to druids in the latest twitter #blizzchat.

Q. Is there any ETA on tree / moonkin form graphical update? A. Moonkin is hard because Moonkin players are so in love with that form. It’s tough to change it at all. We currently hope to do a new tree form for Cataclysm, but no promises.

I think what moonkin would like more than a complete revamp is just color customizations of the already existing forms. A quick re-color ..read the full article

I recently volunteered to help be a moderator at Blog Azeroth, along with a handful of other people. So, now, it’s not just one person burdened with keeping the forum community going, but now there is a whole team of people helping!  It’s nice to see that Phaelia’s BA community keeps growing every day!  If you are a new blogger, you can post in the Introduction forums and then get started on posting about other topics!

One good thing about Blog ..read the full article

Last year I was too busy to finish honoring all my elders for the Lunar Festival. So, it ended up being the last holiday that I needed to finish What a Long Strange Trip It’s been. So, I trekked all over Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, and dungeons across the land. Finally, I finished the Lunar festival achievements, earning myself the title of Elder. At the same time, I also finished What a Long Strange Trip!

I got my violet proto-drake, which ..read the full article

Okay, so Ghostcrawler has posted in multiple balance druid threads in the damage dealing forum in the last week. He shot down two ideas (ie. a glyph for wrath haste scaling, and Owlkin Frenzy buffs).

What are the problems?

Wrath scales poorly with haste, causing there to be a soft-cap of around 400 haste rating, where after that rating level, your wrath cast time drops below a second and clips the GCD (when Nature’s Grace is active). Also causes problems when Heroism ..read the full article

The lunar festival is the last one that I need to finish off for my meta achievement. While I’d participated in this holiday a little bit before, I had never explored and gotten all the elders.

So, in my quest for Elders, I discovered that some of them hide in hard to reach places. The hardest one for me to find was the one outside of Scholomance. It’s not inside the instance. It’s not beyond the locked door. It’s actually on ..read the full article

So, today is the “big reveal” for the Secret Admirer project. The blog that I was assigned to stalk all weekend was Angelya from Revive & Rejuvenate. Over the course of the weekend, I’ve gotten to know her blog a little better. First, she’s a druid blogger, who started writing in December.  She seems to have leveled this druid up over the course of her blog, and just hit level 80! Congrats! Along the way, she has posted a lot ..read the full article

So, today kicks off the blog-stalking in honor of the Love is in the Air holiday. Over at the Pysician’s log, is the rules and the list of blogs that are going to be part of this event. Yes, this is a Secret Admirer event!

The event is sponsored by Blog Azeroth, since there’s a post on Blog Azeroth and Twisted Nether about it. So, this means I get to stalk someone’s blog over the weekend. It should be a lot ..read the full article

So, Druidmain showed me a very disturbing thing that is happening on the “WoW getting started” forum. She has been spending a lot of time in the Getting Started forum, which is designed for experienced players help new players get acquainted in the game. The forum has a lot of guides for new players, and allows players to ask basic questions about the game mechanics that tended to get lost in other forums.

Unfortunately, experienced players have started a really bad ..read the full article

So, the Love is in the Air holiday started over the weekend.

For info on how to do the holiday quests and such, there is a great deal of info on other sites (like wow.com). Instead of writing yet another guide, I thought I’d have a little more fun.

First, apparently, love is in the air even for the turkeys & rabbits of the world. The Spring Rabbit holiday pet can apparently fall in love (and mate with) the Thanksgiving turkey pets. ..read the full article

Okay, so my moonkin is having a terrible time trying to gear up in ICC. I’m having a hard time finding things like belts & bracers out of the 25-man instance that would be worthwhile, and I had to pick up a crit/spirit dagger off Morrow (paired with an off-hand I had from the ICC 5-mans). All the upgrades I really want are either in the 10-man or from badges.

All my gearing frustration, however, just makes me want Cataclysm to ..read the full article

Okay, so I tried to run a Heroic Random dungeon once a day for my frost badges. Some days, I didn’t have time. Other days, I probably did more than one.

However, while everyone around me was getting pug pets, I wasn’t even close for a long time.

Why? Because I mainly ran 5-mans with guild members. Once we could get together a tank and a healer, finding DPS was relatively easy. One of the things I like about my guild is ..read the full article

Okay, so moonkin are getting some attention in the 3.3.2 patch.

The main patch note for moonkin is:

Earth and Moon: This talent now increases the druid’s spell damage by 2/4/6%, up from 1/2/3%.

What this means is that moonkin’s DPS should come out 2.91% better. This change has no effect on the debuff that gives the whole raid 13% damage. It effects only the moonkin’s damage directly. This is a straight buff, which is good. It doesn’t address any underlying problems for ..read the full article