It’s been almost two months now since I was part of a guild regularly doing 25-man content, so I’ve been able to get away with using a bastardized catch-all Resto spec, leaving my other spec slot free for whatever tomfoolery I wished. (Lately, this has been bear tanking.) So, I’m returning to my old ways, of optimizing top-to-bottom for a given role, with regards to my talents. I’ll be using two somewhat distinct, and highly focused builds to fill either the role of raid healing or tank healing as need arises.

Tank Healing

The first, my tank-healing build, is 14/0/57. Using the Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Innervate, and Glyph of Swiftmend, it is tailored to HoT up my chosen tank(s) and then bombard him with big-number, high-crit Nourishes. The only real allowance I’ve made for the changes in 3.2 is adding Empowered Touch to the mix, for the extra 20% of spellpower added to my Nourishes (along with the original 40% of spellpower to Healing Touch.)

I’ve sometimes comtemplated rocking out my 4-piece Tier 7.5 set in this build to nearly duplicate the effect of the Nourish Glyph: “Your Nourish heals an additional 5% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target.” (Lifebloom counts as one HoT whether it’s a single stack, double or triple.)

Raid Healing

For the purposes of raid healing, I’m using 11/0/60 with glyphed Healing Touch, Swiftmend, and Wild Growth. I can hit up to 6 targets with my AoE heal, cast sub-1.0 second Healing Touches for anywhere up to ~11K crits, and Swiftmend all those Rejuvs I’m tossing out to the raid. This build will really shine if I ever get that elusive fourth piece of tier 8, which will add an extra instant Rejuv tick to the target as soon as it’s cast, healing for upwards of 2K and then another ~12K over 15 seconds. Since 3.1 I’ve dropped Revitalize in favor of Living Seed, as my glyphed HT gets tossed around a lot and has a great crit rate.

I’m still adjusting to the new Innervate mechanics, but I so seldom need to Innervate myself anyway that it hasn’t tripped me up yet.

All that having been said, looking forward to getting back into 25-man content again!

Cross-posted via email from Shane’s Posterous

Recent NSUI posts:

• Patch Day PSA: WowMatrix Will No Longer Work
• Patch 3.1: Something Wicked This Way Comes
• VuhDo Child: Interview With The Author
• Killer Combination: AuctionLite + Skillet + LilSparkysWorkshop

Recent lewtz:

• Illustration of the Dragon Soul from OS
• Band of Channeled Magic from Valor badges
• Idol of Awakening from Gothik to complete my Epic achievement
• My T7.5 helm off of KT to complete my 5/5 T7.5 set, which if you ask me looks totally badass.

Recent Lewtz IRL:

• Saw an amazing sale on Newegg for 4GB total of DDR2-1066 from a brand I know and love, which is the fastest RAM my motherboard supports. I had been using 4GB of DDR2-800, and before now, the cheapest I’d seen 1066 RAM at was still $150+.
• My HSF (heatsink & fan) on my CPU died a couple weeks ago. Died hard. My CPU hit 70C+ before I knew what was up, and even after sitting all night to cool off, it would heat up a good 5 degrees in just a few minutes the next morning. So, with some extra money I had from Uncle Sam, I got an E8400, a dual-core at 3.0GHz. Previously had a Q6600 at the stock 2.4GHz.
• Just days before that I had voluntarily spent some more of said “free” money on a shiny new 896MB GTX 260 video card and I couldn’t be happier with it. Upgraded from SLI’ed, and then later a single, 8800GT 512MB.
• I’ve been running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, build 7000, very happily since the official Beta release. It’s been the most stable and high-performance experience I’ve ever had with Windows, excepting a bare-ass Windows XP x64 install. I’m very stoked for its release and might even actually pay for a copy.

3.1 Goodies

I managed to sell a lot of goods on the AH Monday night, enough to pay for my dual spec and then some. I went with:

Restoration: 11/0/60 with Nourish, Innervate and Swiftmend glyphs

Restoration: 11/0/60

I mostly tank heal with more sporadic raid healing, during our 25-man raids. This seems like a good first shot at a post-3.1 build for me and my healing style. Looking for some other 3.1-ready builds from one of my favorite druid bloggers? Check out Syd‘s post at World of Matticus.

Balance: 55/0/16 with Insect Swarm, Starfall, and Wrath glyphs

Balance: 55/0/16

Balance is my “for funsies” spec. I put this one together with a few things in mind: farming, 5-mans and the occasional bout of PvP. I know that isn’t optimal for any of those things, but it’s a good Jack-of-all-trades build, IMO. Some of my inspiration here came from Graylo’s 3.1 builds post over at Gray Matter. He’s been a great source for me as a part-time boomkin.

Addons and Wrap-Up

My addons survived the 3.1 transition well because I update them religiously and tested them weekly-ish on PTR. My realm, and more importantly, my ISP, were not so lucky. For those of you with networking know-how, I was experiencing dropped packets at a rate between 1 in 2 and 1 in 4 for all of last night, to no less than 3 hosts in drastically different locations. Sad panda. I hope I have a better experience with the internet at large tonight.

Look for more updates as my guild, Celestial Being, starts progressing in Ulduar. I can’t wait!