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

Starting today with patch 3.1.2, when the realms come back online, Innervate and its glyph have been changed as follows:

Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid’s base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.

That makes this spell at least as handy as was before 3.1 if not moreso, and is a very nice buff. According to the information here, a level 80 druid casting Innervate on another can expect to restore 15,732 mana to his target. If he or she is also glyphed, he will additionally restore 90% of his or her base mana pool to himself (3496).

Methinks we just became a lot more popular in the raid. The concept of Innervating your Paladin, your Hunter, your Mage, etc. is no longer inherently ridiculous. With the glyph being fairly powerful, we will once again be able to consider sharing the wealth.

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!

Raid Screenshot

Click the image above for the full-resolution 1680×1050 screenshot.

As you can see above, I have a lot going on in my interface, but I’ve tried really hard at keeping it clean, concise, and lightweight, in terms of addon efficiency. Chat messages and names on Recount have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Here is a (quick-and-dirty) diagram showing the majority of what’s on my screen during a raid:

Interface Mockup/Key

I play on a 22″ widescreen at 1680×1050, using a Logitech G5 mouse and a Logitech G15 keyboard.

I covered a handful of the addons I use here and some more here. I’m gearing up to do a total overhaul sometime soon, but in the meantime this is what I’ve been using to raid for last month or so.

LibDataBroker AddOns

In the top left, I have:

• BugSack
• Broker_Memory – a memory usage display, click to start garbage collection and free up some RAM, hover for a list of highest memory usage in your addons
• fps display from Broker_SysMon
• ping display from Broker_SysMon
• Calendar display
• Attrition
• Bagsy
• Outfitter
• gold displayed from Broker_Money

In the center, I have:

• picoFriends
• picoGuild
• AutoText – for posting macros like Vent info, boss tactics, healing assignments, etc.
• Broker_Currency – can be toggled to show any counter from the Currency tab of your character frame, and shows them all in a tooltip on mouseover

In the top right, from left to right, top to bottom, I have:

• Broker_Transit – a portals/teleport/hearth menu
• launchers for Cooking and First aid, from Broker_Professions
• Broker_Switcher – a fullscreen/windowed mode toggle
• gfxToggle2 – for switching between presets for video quality
• configuration button for my LDB display addon of choice, DockingStation
• spell reagents counter
• launchers for my other professions, Alchemy in this case
• BankStack – a super fast way to keep your bags and bank nice and neat
• Broker_Trainer
• TradeBook – lets me view the professions of all my other toons while only using a tiny bit of memory

Unitframes

My party frames are provided by oUF_Perfect, powered by Haste’s oUF and written by P3lim. They show names, health and mana, targets, are colored by class and turn red when a player has aggro.

(I just realized proofreading this post that I do not have a usable screenshot of my actual player/target unitframes, so I’ll have to add those later.)

Next up we have my Grid frames. Mine have mana bars on the bottom, two text lines in the center, and several corner indicators for HoTs and missing buffs. The second line displays a color-coded timer for Lifebloom. The white square in this shot is for Thorns. As you can see, we’ve only got it on our tanks, as it should be. The first row are only the tanks. I took some of what I’m doing with Grid from Resto4Life and two posts from Tree Bark Jacket. Once I put some more time into creating my own Grid setup, I’ll do another blog post, but I’m starting to eye another addon, VuhDo, with some interest.

Other

My buff bars are provided by SimpleBuffBars which I prefer slightly over the more common ElkBuffBars.

On the left you can see my RaidBuffStatus window. This lets me see at a glance who/how many people are missing crucial buffs like Well Fed, flasks, and so on. A control-click will (very matter-of-fact-ly) whisper those players who can give the buff about who is missing it. An alt-click on a buff I can provide myself will cast it on one person who needs it, or if at least 4-5 are missing it, it may cast the group version. In my case, Gift of the Wild instead. The bottom buttons can report to yourself or to a channel/whisper the overall status of who’s missing what.

My lower left chatframes are separated by one last row of LDB addons:

• BuffEnough – self-check for all available buffs
• RBS window toggle
• DropTheCheapestThing
• DBM
• Broker_RaidSave – let’s me see on mouseover exactly what instances I’m saved to and for how long, across all toons
• Omen
• Broker_Recount
• oRA2

The top chatframe has most of the more personal chat channels, party, whisper, raid, and guild, while the bottom one is all the regional channels, says, yells, emotes and so on. You can see the style applied by PhanxChat as well. It’s a very clean, concise look that I really like.

My minimap is customized by pMinimap, also by P3lim, configured to show new mail and server time. Again, very clean and sleek. Below that you can see the rest of my minimap buttons arranged by TidyMinimap, including a redundant BugSack icon that I have since rid myself of, and another DBM button. Rawr!

My actionbars are controlled by Bartender4, here with ButtonFacade and the Caith skin. I do dabble in PvP, but I largely click-cast my heals, so my action bars are fairly empty. You can also see a fine example of my macro naming policy!

On the right I have my micro-menu bar, bags bar, and two (technically three) more chatframes. Rightmost is the vanilla combat log, while the left are colored backdrops for EavesDrop.

All in all, it’s served me well, but this UI layout and collection of addons are getting a little long in the tooth, and to be honest, a little chunky too. Here’s to hoping I can come up with something svelte over the next week or so.