SSC Progress

It's late and I'm tired, so I won't go into too much detail. However, after a couple of nights trying, we've now downed Hydross. We might have gotten him down a bit sooner, but our first try was with 4 resto druids, a priest and a pugged pally healer. The fight is quite nasty for resto druids. More on that later.

Most of the Hydross strategies recommend between 8 and 9 healers. We had 6...well, almost 6. Tonight we had 2 restos, a pally, and three priests - one of them seriously undergeared. It took a couple of attempts and getting the timing down, but Hydross is now on our official kill list. Woot!

We moved on to down Lurker and decided to call it quits for the night. Tomorrow we'll be back, jousting at Tidewalker.

We took a group to ZA once we finished up in SSC tonight. I'd run with various folks in the group before, but not run ZA with that exact group. It was good fun and we cleared the first four bosses. I know they want to get in there before it resets on Friday to make a run at Hex Lord. Not sure when that will happen though.

More Spec Debate

I recently posted asking for some advice on my spec and referencing a post I'd read on Resto4Life's blog about specing into brambles and insect swarm. I recently read a couple of posts on Gray Matter's blog about how useless brambles and insect swarm are in a raid setting. I tend to lean more towards Resto4Life's opinion - particularly as she's given the math to back up her position. What do y'all think?

Spec advice?

I read recently on Resto4Life's blog some interesting information about a resto druid's ability to heal heroics. Essentially, especially for a druid who is still getting geared, healing a heroic can be quite difficult - much of the healing ends up being outside of tree form, as you cannot cast Healing Touch while a tree.

As a result of this post, along with others I've read on Phaelia's site and elsewhere, I am (again) considering a respec. I'm currently 0-20-41, and am contemplating moving 5 points back into resto to improve my healing touch. I'm also considering whether to move the remaining 15 points over to balance to pick up brambles & insect swarm. But I'm also tempted to put an extra point or three in Natural Perfection to pick up extra crit chance.

The quagmire of talent specs. :(

If any of you have some worthwhile advice, I'm all ears.

+Healing

Just prior to entering Kara, I had a +Healing of 730. I figured I was doing pretty good. Then I heard what the other healers had... +1780, +1650, etc. I was mortified! How could I hope to do *anything* with my sub-800 healing?! But less than a week later, I was up to +1230. Between some nice drops in Kara, a couple of helpful enchants, turning in some PVP points for a new mace (which I had to go train for) and a rather short Lower City rep grind to pick up the Lower City Prayer Book, I saw a nice jump in stats.

Now I'm starting to focus on some "must-replace" gear (like my chestpiece) and grinding a bit more rep for some lovely upgrades. I sometimes wonder how others seem to manage to balance raiding, rep grinding, dailies, grinding for upgrades and...oh yeah... real life.

Remain Resto or Respec?

Having leveled resto from Day 1, I have had many an opportunity to run instances - they were sometimes the easiest way to gain XP as well as a good opportunity to meet new folks. PUGS R US. With a few exceptions, I have been in some awesome PUGs - I find that letting folks know up-front the PUG rules/expectations works really well.

So I managed to get all the way to level 67 without a spec-crisis. I was on travel (you never know how hotel lag is going to be) and was vehemently asked to heal for a PUG going to Sethekk Halls. I'd never run that instance before, didn't know anyone in the group, but was assured it would be cake - we were running with two prot warriors. Well, it wasn't cake. We managed to inch our way to the last boss, despite my plethora of problems - pulling aggro, occasional lag, and general unfamiliarity with the instance.

However, we couldn't down the last boss. After several wipes, I was typing out a suggestion that they might be better finding another healer (my lag wasn't preventing the healing, but I couldn't seem to get out of the boss's AOE in time) when I was unceremoniously kicked from the group. Ouch. I would have gladly left on my own and was just suggesting that very thing.

At any rate, the experience was demoralizing and I lost confidence in my ability to heal anything. I stayed away from instances for more than two weeks, finally only agreeing when Dorchah, a shadow priest and good friend of mine, insisted they needed me. I was quite tempted to respec to something (anything) other than resto. The problem was, I generally really enjoy healing and the challenges it presents.

I stuck to getting Kara-attuned and running dailies for a while. A few weeks later, still hesitant about my spec and my direction, having achieved all but the Black Morass step of Kara-attunment, I was running dailies up in Og'rila and grouped up with some folks I hadn't met before to get banishing over with quickly. Oddly enough, in that one short session, I ended up with two invitations to join raiding guilds.

One of those guilds, Ásgård, took me down to Black Morass and helped me get attuned. Then they proceeded to invite me to run Kara with them that night. Keeping in mind that Essy is my main (not Deressy), and really I wanted to join a raiding guild with *zul so we could raid together, I was hesitant to make any sort of commitment until he and I had discussed it and he'd had a chance to get to know the guys from Ásgård and decide for himself.

Lucky for me, the guys (and gals) from Ásgård are a quality bunch and were happy to have me run Kara with them for a couple of weeks while the *zuls got to know them better. As you've probably noticed, not only did I not respec, but I joined Ásgård as did Hunzul.