Archeology sucks less, and other things from the patch

Let me preface by saying that Archeology still is a huge time sink and can slowly kill hopes and dreams if you are trying for something like the Troll sword.

However, if you are a druid, a few things added to the tradeskill makes it easier to deal with.

Works with shapeshift forms Really this means that you don't have to come out of Flight form before clicking on the dig button. This makes things move along at a lovely pace. Couple this with the guild perk working for birdies and ZOOM!

Lower cooldown Finally, it's dropped to a 3 second cooldown. This is just about perfect and there's no need to wait for the button while you moved a few yards.

Increase on Tol'vir spawns Many more sites have been added, which was badly needed. This is great news for folks looking for Canopic Jars or other goodies like the Ring of the Boy Emperor and Staff of Ammunae.

And lastly, the sale price of the trash increased. This is still based on RNG, but in my efforts for the trinket, I netted about 1k gold in trash in about 10 hours or so. Are there better ways to make gold? Yes but archeology isn't about money making, now is it? I would highly recommend getting Archeology Helper if you are going to be doing serious digging. Having this sped up the time spent on dig sites tremendously.

Around the forums

Since I was sick and basically spent all day digging, I managed get caught up on the goings on in the druid and healing forums.

There is a small debate on Haste vs Mastery right now. Not sure why, to be honest. I feel that if you can get to the WG haste breakpoint, sweet. If you can't, then Mastery might be for you.

And there are reasons to look at Mastery right now, if you weren't before. Wild growth dropped to 8 seconds and changes to Nature's bounty with Rejuv means the two spells work together more effectively and it speeds up Nourish if you choose to top them off that way. I am still working out the best way to fit Nourish in so I can't comment on if Nature's Bounty is truly an effective route for raid healing.

Be careful, though. Just when you got used to a lower mana cost on Rejuv, now it costs a little more and you may find yourself losing more mana with the Wild Growth. It took me a few pulls to adjust to this and be more cautious. (Speaking of mana, TBJ has a good write up on Innervate.)

All of this is in effort to increase our healing throughput, which they did. We still have bursty issues outside of Tranquility,

I need to take a moment and mention the great bear scandal.

Reesi, a long time member of the community posted some information about Thick Hide and inconsistencies with taking damage between bears. This was followed up by a blue

After the designers looked into this issue more, there appears to be a pretty complex series of bugs that may have led to where we are now. I'll do my best to explain.

Early on in Cataclysm, it was concluded that druid tanks took too much damage and we deployed a hotfix to buff their armor through Thick Hide. Originally, we had thought that 4.0.6 was just updating the Thick Hide tooltip as well as the armor display on the character sheet for the earlier hotfix, but we think now that the armor buff itself was actually correctly applied with 4.0.6, and the previous hotfix had never taken hold properly.

The reason we missed this is because there is no easy way to know what your armor actually is when you can’t trust the tooltip – you have to have things beat on you and see how much damage you take. This test was tainted by a second bug however, where some druid characters were invisibly retaining the 12% damage reduction benefit of the obsolete Protector of the Pack talent. Even though we removed that talent, its effects were still benefitting some characters, and we didn't know who or how many. Again, there is no easy way to know if your druid was affected without a lot of testing. We knew about the Protector of the Pack bug but were hesitant to try and mess with it too much via hotfix since bear survivability was where we wanted it to be for those characters and we didn’t want to risk making anything worse. In any event, those characters appeared to be taking the correct amount of damage, so we thought the Thick Hide hotfix was successful. In reality, we think we were seeing the Protector of the Pack damage reduction and not the Thick Hide armor buff.

We believe the 4.0.6 patch finally removed the Protector of the Pack effects while finally getting the Thick Hide buff applied. Characters who had the Protector of the Pack benefit won’t see their survivability change much (they lost damage reduction while gaining armor), while characters who lacked that talent will see their survivability improve (they gained a lot of armor). The good news is that current bear survivability in 4.0.6 appears to be where we want it to be for everyone.

We’re still not 100% sure that the above explanation is what happened, but it seems consistent with our observations. Again, as of 4.0.6, bear armor should now be correct.

TL;DR Things are now normalized between bear tanks. If you are like me and switched to feral after the patch, you should feel a little less squishy.

Threat changes still seem to be a issue. Believe they are recommending adding a little more hit/expertise to your gear. For heroics, I switched to my Left Eye of Rajh to compensate.

Other things not druid related: Pallies got nerfed a bit through the latest hotfix, and Discs finally got the bubble love they needed.

Shaman still need hugs... so go hug one today.

What I signed on for

I am the floater; the one who says "Sure thing" when a spot needs to be filled. The implications of this was felt right off the start before last night's raid.

Not the first night! sigh

A healer for Team Martin had lost power for several hours and we didn't expect to see her online in time. I mentally though I had prepared for myself to be filling her spot, then panicked. I had no food, no flasks, no mana pots. My bags were filled with tanky stuff. Twenty minutes before raid time, I am scrambling to get my crap together... and just before we zone in poor snowed-in healer logged in. Yay!

Tonight, we are out other healers for Team Charlie, which means more shuffling. At least this time I will have my consumables prepared, but now the task is to get caught up on what fight and strats the other team was working on. Thankfully, my finance was a tank for Charlie so I was able to at least understand what progress they had made.

All of this opens my eyes to the big picture. While we run these 10s in preparation for 25s, my job is to be aware and prepared for anything and possibly fit myself into a team that had worked on something for a night already without screwing up their flow.

As things move further down the road, we will be shuffling everyone around in order to keep things fair, which means at some point our fights will be reexplained to more people than just myself.

Balancing act

I have points to spend, but I am at a loss of how to spend them. My job as the tank is hopefully a short one because it means we can move to 25s. But, when we get to 25s I want to be on par with the rest of our healers. I currently am at a loss for how to walk this tight rope. I can just hear my raid leader saying to not stress about it, we are still early into raiding, but I am a planner. I need to have something scribbled out as a framework. I think it helps that the RL is also doing the bouncing thing like I am (dps to tank and back).

Words of wisdom?

For those who are also playing dual roles actively, I say "Wow, you are a crazy person". I also say, stay on your toes and be patient and flexible. Communicate to your officers about what they expect of you. If you are an officer, like I am, refer to crazy statement and hang on for the ride.