Fear me! For I R Leafy!

Maybe...

I'm levelling a Druid to be Resto, mainly to get my main (Taurack) out of Resto spec and back into the face-smashy goodness that is Enhancement.

Now, Pochani (said Druid) just hit level 64 this past weekend. I vowed to go Resto once I hit 64 and got Lifebloom, giving me at least some time to experience healing as a Druid before I made a fool of myself trying to heal in a raid. Now since my Shaman is currently Resto and has gone on and off as such more than once when we've suffered shortages of healers, it's not like I'm a noob to the healing game, but the distinct HoT oriented style of Druid healing is completely new, since Shaman's have 0 HoT's.

Pochani has been Feral his whole career so far and has been quite successful, so the switch will come with a learning curve.

Now that he's 64, I ported to Moonglade, got my new spells, hit the unlearn talent buttons and applied all 55 points in a distinctly Healy way. The problem I'm having is trying to find that balance between getting a respectable amount of experience healing, not only as a Druid, but as a Tree... yet not stunting my levelling ability to a crawl. I did it as a Prot Warrior and really dont want to go down that painfully slow path again, which the spec I had chosen was reflecting very soon after I got back into quest mode.

I've done a lot of research on Resto4Life (Phaelia roxxors my soxxors) so I like to think I have the theory down well enough. So in trying to find this balance, I applied a recent post of hers regarding speccing Balance/Resto. While this spec is great and saw my DPS increase by about 100, I find the distinct lack of Treeform not to my taste. While I certainly agree that her spec is probably more favourable to the grinding/questing that still needs to be done, I find it not to my tastes.

The reasoning behind it all is that I want to learn to adapt to the more HoT based healing that Druids lean towards. I agree whole heartedly with her theories about Dreamstate builds and others that simulate Tree of Life in all forms and the sometimes rather heavy reliance on Healing Touch as opposed to HoT's, so it is in no way that I'm trying to discredit her... I'm just more masochistic I guess. I want to learn early on how to deal with the downfalls of our Leafy form so that it's not as much of a burden come Raiding time.

I did however learn a few good things while specced as Phaelia's Balance/Resto spec, one of which is that Starlight Wrath is your friend. I think I'll be using a hybrid spec of hers and mine once I log back onto him and shell out another 30g to try it out.

I'll update this post with my specs over the weekend (hopefully).