by Mimetir

If you do know something about macros then have a read anyway – some of these might be basic to you, but you might pick up something that saves your skin, bark or cow-printed hide.

Paladins

1. Buffs up quicksmart

/castsequence [target=focus] Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield

• This macro will put both of your essential healing buffs up on your focus, which is likely to be the tank.
• TIP: you can use the addon Need To Know in conjunction with this setup. It’ll give you permanent timer bars for those buffs regardless of whom you’re targetting.

2. Easy judging

/cast [target=focustarget] Judgement of Light

• Casts your judgement of light which both does healing and gives you a powerful haste buff
• It won’t cause you to overaggro when casting your judgement as you’re using it on the tank’s target
• Means you don’t have to mess around with tab or mouse targetting a mob to cast it on. You may need to re-target your tank but that’s less trouble than having to target everything manually.
• TIP: you could use the addon Clique, which will allow you to set up mouse and key bindings for anything you could wish. Want to heal the tank? Sure, click the <insert mouse button here> and you needn’t retarget them after using your JoL macro.

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by Tyler Caraway

this is going to be an introduction to balance PvP. I’ll examine talents, team comps, strategies, and gearing,. This isn’t the end all, be all of how to do balance PvP. There are lots of options, lots of things you can try or experiment with. PvP in and of itself is a very large experiment where you can test what can and cannot work. This may gloss over some topics, but I will try to provide as much information as I can. If you feel that there is anything of glaring importance that I missed, then leave a comment on the issue and I will correct it as soon as I am able to.

1. What is balance PvP?

The balance spec is the druid’s caster DPS tree. In PvP, the tree focuses on dealing damage, some control, and occasional healing.

2. Advantages of balance PvP

• Able to put out high levels of pressure if given the opportunity to free cast.
• Very solid levels of control against various targets, though more so against melee.
• A solid number of debuffs to act as a form of dispel protection.
• Solid synergy with multiple casters.

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by Matt Low

The professor has a masters degree in potions and a Ph.D in raid wiping. Even the most stalwart of healers will have face a barrage of obstacles that will affect healing ability. This guy is my personal Achilles heel in Icecrown so far. Not more than a few days ago, I went an embarrassing 8 for 8 on Malleable Goo deaths. Talk about my pride being wounded. I’m supposed to be good at dodging stuff that comes flying toward me not running into them or getting drilled in the face by this green exploding goo.

Anyway, keep reading for my awesome mistakes and what I learned from them.

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a basic understanding of the Professor Putricide encounter. This article is meant mainly for the healers.

Alright, on to phase 1!

Phase 1

Pick two tank healers to cover your tank on Professor Putricide. If one of them gets focused by a green slime or has to kite the orange cloud, at least you’ll have one more for support. In any case, this early phase is a light one and there isn’t a whole lot of healing that needs to be done. You can probably get away with five healers. If your DPS is jaw-droppingly amazing, take 6 with you instead.

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by Allison Robert

1. What is bear?

Bear is a sub-spec of the feral tree allowing the druid to tank.

2. The bear’s advantages:

• The highest average health of all four tanking classes, and the highest average effective health before cooldowns.
• Excellent single-target threat and decent, spammable AoE threat.
• Traditionally a high-damage tank.
• The only tank with a cooldown usable while stunned or otherwise incapacitated (Barkskin).
• Fear immunity/break on a 3-minute cooldown (Berserk).
• Immune to polymorph, seduce, and disarm (more accurately, the worst effect of disarm).
• Able to supply an improved attack power reduction, Faerie Fire, Mangle’s bleed debuff, a debuff to boss/mob attack speed (Infected Wounds), and a raid healing buff (Improved Leader of the Pack).
• When not required to tank, can shift to cat to generate more damage.
• As with all druids, can supply Tranquility, Innervate, and a battle rez to the raid (although bears are generally the least able to do so at any given time).
• The tank of choice for thoroughly awesome people.

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by Tyler Caraway

Balance druids themselves are quite an amazing bunch, but balance druid alts are a completely different story. In all honesty though, even the veteran balance druids cannot agree on talents from time to time. I figured, after a few threats of maiming, that a beginner’s guide would actually be a really good thing; providing the caveat that some of the more controversial talents be explored more in-depth.

This is mostly going to be a post geared towards players that have limited knowledge of the balance spec but cannot resist the allure of having the single best dance in the game that other players can only dream of competing against. This is a light guide, not a Holy Bible for balance damage dealing. Although the basics of the balance rotation are not as complex as, say, a cat druid’s; there are intricacies within the play-style that can be used to boost DPS in very minor ways. If you happen to be a long standing balance druid, you will probably know most of this, or even have developed a differing way of doing things. That is fine, the one great thing about balance druids is that there are multiple ways to achieve the same goal, but please understand that some topics may just be glossed over.

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by Allison Robert

This is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. Unfortunately, the truth is that cat DPS is less suited to this approach than any other druid spec, due to the complicated mechanics behind armor penetration and the sheer difficulty of the cat DPS “rotation.” An experienced cat is likely to notice a number of situational omissions from this article. I have tried to point out resources below that cover these in more detail. As always, if I’ve goofed or you think I’ve left out something really important, drop a comment and I’ll make sure it gets fixed/added.

Coldbear has an excellent (though at times hard to follow, and most assuredly NSFW!) video on how to DPS as a cat druid, and is also the primary author of the extensive Wowwiki entry on Feral DPS. You will also want to bookmark and use Elitist Jerks’ Cat DPS Guide for Dummies (which is essentially an extended and mathier version of this article). I’ve also been incredibly impressed by Alaron’s work on his blog, The Fluid Druid (although due to RL issues his posting will probably be light for a bit).

1. What is cat?

Cat is a sub-spec of the feral tree allowing the druid to perform competitive melee DPS.

2. The cat’s benefits:

• Competitive and potentially chart-topping damage in the hands of a good player.
• Provides a raid-wide 5% chance to crit for melee/ranged attacks (Leader of the Pack).
• Can provide passive healing for melee and ranged players (Improved Leader of the Pack) and a debuff slowing boss attack speed (Infected Wounds).
• Can provide the Mangle debuff, increasing bleed damage.
• Able to off-tank when necessary. The hallmark of a competent feral player is the ability to switch seamlessly between tanking and melee DPS, and with dual spec, players can be even better in both roles.
• As with all druid specs, can Innervate casters, pop Tranquility for emergencies, and battle-rez.
• Interesting, dynamic, and challenging rotation. The cat cannot be accused of “faceroll” DPS.

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by Allison Robert

A quick note on what I want to accomplish here: I’m addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become reasonably competent healers quickly. By necessity, that means we’re going to gloss over a few finer points; this is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. When I say (for example) that Improved Tranquility needs to be dragged out behind a barn and killed with an axe, I’m not going to spend paragraphs explaining why that is, or examining situations where you could actually get some use from it.

1. What is restoration?

Restoration is the healing tree (pun!) available to the druid class.

2. Restoration’s benefits:

• The best array of Heal over Time (HoT) spells in the game.
• Tremendous mobility while healing.
• A specialized form (Tree of Life) available as a 41-point talent, providing a 6% healing received buff to the raid and boosting the druid’s healing efficiency and throughput.
• Arguably the most mana-efficient healer, with a choice over using Innervate for themselves or giving it to another player.
• Arguably the most annoying healer to kill in PvP (when specced and geared).
• Very little competition for gear if you stick with leather +spellpower pieces.
• In the hands of a skilled player, the best and most effective healer for fights with heavy and frequent raid damage.

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by Zach Yonzon

1Druids, by and large, have a very high survivability as a class. Pair this with their supreme mobility and you’ve got one hell of a fight on your hands.

Shapeshifting
The one distinguishing characteristic of a druid is the ability to shapeshift. This is their greatest strength and ironically one of their notable weaknesses. When the class was designed, the folks at Blizzard envisioned a protean opponent that constantly changed forms during an encounter. While the design didn’t completely end up that way, with druids mostly keeping to one form suited for a particular task (e.g., bears when tanking), players get to see druids change shape more often during PvP. It’s essential. Some of the best druids switch forms appropriately and often, although this can sometimes take a toll on their mana.

Druids are a hybrid class and thus enjoy the benefit of having three distinct roles and fighting styles which can confuse enemies at the beginning of a fight. Their shapeshifting, noted as their strength, is also their weakness here as it usually reveals their hand earlier than other hybrid classes because their forms are usually distinctive to their spec. A moonkin, for example, is obviously a ranged caster and likely to be an unsavory opponent in Eye of the Storm (stay away from the edge just to make sure).

By the same token, a druid is weakest in their normal (whatever passes for normal for a shapeshifting class, anyway), humanoid state. There is almost never a better time to beat down a druid as when they are in their Night Elf or Tauren — and soon Worgen and Troll — forms trying to cast a life-saving spell. Their various forms confer numerous protective benefits, and improvements to the moonkin and Tree of Life forms in the past have made for irritatingly surprisingly resilient opponents. Fortunately for would-be druid killers, forms have some restrictions, too.

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by Allison Robert

Lady Deathwhisper

General strategy: Wowwiki has a pretty decent one, as does TankSpot. Numerous comments both there and elsewhere have noted the fight’s resemblance to M’uru, which promises to be a jolly old time on heroic.

Apart from that:

Step one: Bind all keys to Remove Curse.
Step two: Roll face from left to right across the keyboard at a speed not exceeding 5 mm per second.
Step three: Mark your calendar for the 6th week in a row that she has failed to drop Ring of Maddening Whispers.
Step four: Wait while a squabble over some football team breaks out during loot distribution, with the raid leader ransoming gear until someone is forced to apologize for an insult made regarding the parentage of the quarterback.
Step five: Get on the elevator and ride up.
Step six: Get back on the elevator and ride down and resurrect whatever DPS fell off.

This accounts for most of the truly important features of the Deathwhisper encounter, but as always, there are some compelling minutiae:

Placement: You should stand in the middle of the room, or at least somewhere within decurse range of everyone in the raid (tanks are the most likely to duck in and out of range while grabbing adds).

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