ToS | Z is for Zeirah

Usually a new raid is really exciting because it brings upgrades but I’m pretty much over halfway through mythic Tomb of Sargeras and I’m still wearing Nighthold tier. It’s not from lack of drops.. I’ve got the full 6 set including 2 pieces of mythic and the rest heroic warforged but I just don’t know when to change into it.

Tier 19 was awesome for restos, the 2 piece gave us 4000 mastery for 7 seconds after a wild growth and 4 piece gave the chance of an extra rejuv to randomly proc on a person. Both handy bonuses. Tier 20 on the other hand.. the 2 set gives a chance for a direct heal’s cd to be shorter based on the health of the person you’re using it on (up to 40% reduction based on less health). The cd is usually 30 secs and the most I’ve been able to get it reduced to is 20sec. To get the full 40% reduction a person pretty much needs to be under 10% health which in raid situation with 3 other healers spamming on low health targets, you’ll be lucky to see this regularly. To try to get the max cd reduction means it’s also a case of deciding if you’ll hold off using the spell in case another player drops a bit lower than your intended target. On it’s own the 2 piece is actually very weak.

The 4 piece bonus boosts the healing of your Efflorence ground effect spell by 200% when you use Swiftmend, Very nice sounding bonus but so dependent on the fight being stacked with minimal movement for periods of hopefully at least 10 secs, or longer so you don’t have to move efflo each time.

I’ve been looking at warcraft logs a lot to see how many people are moving away from Tier 19 and I can’t find any druids who are healing really well who are actually wearing T20. First full page of druids for each fight is pretty much showing everyone still in NH gear. The few times I’ve tried swapping into 4 pce ToS gear my healing just seems a lot lower than when I’m in Tier 19. You’d think Sisters on Mythic would be great as the mythic version is very much a stand still/stacking fight, people very rarely move around during the times when the floor is changing colour so Efflo can at least stay down in one place for as long as possible but it doesn’t seem to really boost HPS at all.

It really feels like something went wrong in the design process when you have pretty much a whole class skipping a tier in favour of staying the previous one and it doesn’t help that our tier bonus really changes the way your play druid, moving the emphasis away from your hots and onto a ground effect. It’s really bad in 5mans where there’s too much movement and too little time people stay in your ground effect to actually even waste time and mana dropping it. It really feels that whoever designed the tier just doesn’t really have a good handle on the Druid play style.

I’m really hoping it’s not going to be a case that I go from Tier 19 straight into Tier 21:

Item – Druid T21 Restoration 2P Bonus – Yseras Gift Applies HoT: Ysera’s Gift now applies Dreamer to the target, healing them for (240% of Spell power) over 8 sec.
Item – Druid T21 Restoration 4P Bonus – Ysera’s Gift Heals Faster: When you cast Wild Growth, you have a 50% chance to cause Ysera’s Gift to heal a target 400% more frequently for 10 sec.

Ysera’s gift is the passive that heals me for 3% of my maximum health for 5sec, if I’m at full health it goes to a random injured player instead. It’s a fairly mindless bonus but at least it’s back to hots which is a Druids bread and butter fantasy.

I keep waiting for either a buff to Tier 20 or a nerf to Tier 19 to make us move away from it, but there’s been utter silence on it. Rather like the silence surrounding Druid’s discussion over our messed up class ‘form’.

First impressions is that this place is enormous!! The rooms are huge and there’s caverns to run through and winding twisting passageways. I can see a lot of getting lost for the first couple of weeks. I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos as I wanted to have but hopefully when we finish clearing the place out this week I can go back in and photograph to my heart’s content.

It’s certainly not as pretty as Nighthold, but there’s lots of little details that make me want to explore it so much more. We came across a really cool little room which had chairs and bookcases in it, I really wanted to stay in there and poke around but my guildies were rushing through, so I’ll come back!

The plan last night was to take all the main toons through normal together and then when it was done we’d break into our first heroic split run which is half alts, half mains and clear as far as we could with the alts, then everyone would swap – alts to mains and vice versa and restart.

The fights on normal were pretty quick but they did give help to give a look at the fights even if we didn’t get the best idea of what the mechanics were as we pushed a little too fast.The fights are different enough from NH that it feels like a real change and not just more of the same. I absolutely loved the fight that has a whale leap out of the water and had to keep an eye on the watery floor for bubbles to move out of it. Dec was chanting ‘bubbles bubbles’ throughout that whole fight and making me wonder what the heck he was talking about until I saw the water bubbling for myself. I never saw the whale though which doesn’t surprise me at all, I tend to miss a lot of things in raids when I’m staring at my healing bars.

We got up to the Maiden as the 7^th boss right before scheduled maintenance so we only had a few attempts on her which was interesting. Her mechanic splits the raid randomly depending on a the colour you get assigned – light or fel and coming into contact with a person or ability that belongs to the other colour puts a bomb onto that person that explodes with raid wide damage. You can minimize this by jumping into the hole in the middle of the room and exploding down there and the bomb then throws you back up and out. Our raid was exploding with people everywhere.. it was hilarious to watch but it’s going to be a pain if that isn’t sorted out lol.

I was lucky with the legendary upgrade drops and could pop back to Dalaran mid way through the raid and upgrade my Velen’s to 970! That was a huge upgrade to it. Next one I’ll do will probably be Prydaz as I know I’ll be using those two legendaries a lot. I’m not sure what ones I’ll do next, if I get more Haste/Mast gear it’ll be shoulders but I don’t like how they feel with my current stat/gear set up so I’m sticking to Prydaz/Velens at the moment. I really want to get the new ring which grants me Soul of the Forest and luckily it’ll come at 970 when I eventually see it so I won’t have to upgrade.

After the shutdown, the door to the Maidens room was locked as if we hadn’t cleared through to her so we couldn’t finish the normal run. We decided to start the first split run on heroic and as my Shaman is rostered on the first run, she got to see heroic bosses before my Druid did! We ended up getting the first 3 done on heroic before raid was finished. My shaman was lucky enough to bonus roll (alts can’t roll on raid loot) a 920 trinket which was a big upgrade as well as completing the quest to make her first legendary to 970 so her ilvl jumped over 5 points in one run. She only has 2 legendaries so lucky I don’t have very many to have to upgrade. Maybe she’ll see more as I’m doing more content on her regularly. I’m starting to feel a bit more confident on her and more gear will definitely help her healing numbers.

I haven’t looked at what affixs are up this week but really hope I can manage to drag her through a mythic 15 this week for the 930 loot out of the cache. It might be a death march so hopefully I find some patient people in pugs. That’s the huge downside of being Alliance, there’s just not enough Ally on my friends list that are into mythic plus dgns to run with. I need more Alliance friends!

Tbh I actually am a little homesick for Horde and my Horde friends a lot. Alliance has some really great points but Horde still feels like home. Every time I put my teleport cloak on, I always think I’m heading to Orgrimmar and usually get a surprise when I see the Stormwind loading screen come up. After nearly 5 years Horde, how long is it going to take for me to get used to Alliance?

We don’t go back to ToS until Sunday night but hopefully I can sneak into Normal and poke around the parts we’ve already done and get some nice photos.