Healing without leaves

I have two goblin starting zone posts lined up, but the beta keeps giving me the bird when I try to log in, so I've been unable to get the last few explanatory screen shots that I want. Jumping ahead, let's talk about how I'm faring with my tauren gal.

Who have I been reading?

Beru's Q&A on Falling Leaves and Wings

Lissanna's Resto guide on Restokin

Keeva's spec/FAQ guide on TBJ

RestoDude's RestoGuide

Spec and Glyphs

I poked around on all the specs offered in the list above and came up with the following to cautiously test my mana pool and new abilities.

talent calc here

I would like to include Nature's Cure and Blessing of the Grove and max out Nature's Majesty. I'm still thinking about Fury of Stormrage and Malfurion's Gift, but only for the chance of Lifebloom proccing Omen of Clarity, and I'm not sure how much I'll want that at 85. Perhaps a lot. I see Genesis looking delicious in the second tier of Balance, but I'm not sure how I would juggle points to get down there, so I'm not going to worry about it until later.

Having done a handful of heroics and two raids, I think I'm ready to get rid of Furor and invest those points in something else. With what I have on me now, it's unusual if I dip below 75% mana, and that's with Rejuve spam and much generous casting.

With the changes to Regrowth, I switched to the Lifebloom Prime glyph. In Major glyphs, I stuck Healing Touch in instead of Innervate because I don't expect to do much innervating for a while. Minor glyphs are what they are. I just can't get enough of that fast Aquatic Form! With glyphs, because of the distinct lack of options, it seems pretty easy to pick what you should use. Well, to be honest, when it comes to specs as well it seems that just by avoiding PVP stats I can make myself a good PVE build and avoid picking a terrible spec simply due to what's available.

Gear, Gems, Enchants

This is the part where I reveal exactly how lazy I have been. (Hint: very, very lazy) It's actually more of a to-do list than anything.

To get my leather specialization, I need to replace my Circle of Ossus with the Belt of Petrified Ivy. Then I will need gems for that and also for my Idol of the Black Willow. I'm not sure if I will be replacing any of the other gems that I already have socketed - although I would not be opposed to replacing some of my gems with Int/Haste to get haste-capped, I'm not sure if I want to spend the time and money to do that scant weeks before I start replacing these sick purpz with quest rewards.

As far as reforging goes, I'm considering playing around with spirit pieces to see if I can't eke out some more haste, or see what this mastery business is all about. This is mostly encouraged by my current lack of mana problems. I think I can get away with losing some regen in favor of getting closer to haste cap!

Spells

I am feeling the hurt left behind by lack of a long hot from Regrowth. Before the patch I would load up the squishies and healers of a group with Regrowth before say, Bonestorm or BQL's fear. Then, as I was running willy nilly around during said phases, I would Rejuve anything in range and LB people in particular trouble. Now, I feel like I only have one hot - obviously that's not true, but Regrowth's hot is kind of a joke, and LB is restricted to one person. Fortunately, I was able to fully retrain myself in tonight's raid to not only stop casting it on more than one person, but to keep in rolling instead of using it for free mana during OOC procs.

Regrowth replaces Nourish as my quick top-off. Nourish and HT are excruciatingly slow (it's ok, other healing classes, you can laugh), often either too late to save someone or needless overheal. For now, HT is still relegated to my NS+HT macro, or if I happen to hit the wrong button and have the time to watch it go off. I feel like I'm missing a medium cast, medium heal spell. I'm still keeping Wild Growth on cooldown and tossing Rejuve around on DPS in addition to keeping it on the tank. I feel less inclined to cast, having only the useful Regrowth and the cumbersome, overzealous HT, and yet lacking in hots. To be honest, I don't always know how to spend my GCDs. I find myself lacking instants or quick casts, but wasting time and mana when I try out the longer casts. I guess the idea is to spam Regrowth...hopefully I can retrain myself to do that soon.

Efflorescence is a mixed bag...I like planning where to drop it in the same way I plan where I use WG. Unfortunately, because of that, I feel wasteful when I use Swiftmend on a ranged target all by her lonesome and end up with a useless healing circle miles from the raid. Also, I'm not sure if it includes overheal in the percentage it heals targets standing in it for. For instance, if the melee is taking damage but the tank is topped off, a Swiftmend on the tank that heals for 1000 won't create much of a healing puddle. If it doesn't take overheal into account, it would obviously be better to SM a low-health melee, but sometimes you don't have the GCDs to prep with a Rejuve and then SM. 

Tree of Life now seems very foreign to me. It's still on the class bar which tempts me to click it, but I always remember at the last moment that if I do it will blow the cooldown. Incidentally, cooldowns like this have always confused me. In fact, I try to avoid on-use trinkets in favor of equip style effects because I never know when I should save the cooldowns for! It's not the same as being dps, where most long cooldowns should be saved for bloodlust or a time-sensitive phase. I'm torn between macroing it to a spell like Lifebloom or Regrowth to ensure it gets used once in a while, or putting it somewhere unobtrusive on my bar to save for some phase in some boss fight that puts out lots of raid damage.

Raid Frames

Grid, my current raid frames of choice, has updated, but I still need the capabilities of status hots. I did get an update for GridStatusHots, but it won't actually work when I turn the buffs on. This is very sad, because the hots plugin uses colors in the corner dot indicators to show when the hot is about to expire, which I find more visually useful than a numerical display. Grid itself will show the hot buffs, but as one uniform color for the entire duration of the hot, and without regard to who cast it (even if I specify "My Hots").

Because Lifebloom is now single target, I've set it to central icon display. It shows stacks, and very dimly duration (the icon is rather small). If I can get PowerAuras to load without crashing everything I might make a duration alert for myself (to be fair, it could be any number of things causing me to crash, including but not limited to: addons, mobs, instances, usable items, unusable items, logging in).

I'd love to have it show me who is affected by Efflorescence. I never had space for a WG indicator before, but I added it to my buff indicators this week and it's really surprised me with the range of affected targets! Sadly, Eff. doesn't appear to create a buff when standing in it, so I'm not sure how or if I could get Grid to recognize it.

Standard UI vs. Grid

I opened the Blizz raid frames to check them out. I like a lot of what they are doing, and there are indicators for useful things like range, offline, dead, mana/energy/etc, and buff indicators. It even shows my hots - although the countdown is still not clear enough. My biggest complaints are that the buffs obscure the health bars sometimes, which makes me nervous, and the frames are enormous. I have them set to the lowest possible size and a ten man raid still takes up so much space! I'm curious to see if mod authors will (can?) make addons for these new frames, and if that will make them worth switching over to.

Other Patch Comments

It's Hallow's End now, so I've been spending lots of time taking my various alts around for their candy buckets and trick or treating on Aka to try to get A Mask for All Occasions. I've also been taking advantage of the Invocation of the Wickerman reputation gain buff by turning in my junkboxes for Ravenholdt and inscription decks for Darkmoon Faire. I'm still doing ZG and MC regularly and also working on my Ally priest, who just got shadowform! Yaaay!

Addon updates are coming in slowly but surely; I haven't lost any major ones fortunately. However, there has been a huge change regarding buff mods - you can no longer right click to cancel buffs using any mod! If you use the extremely limited standard Blizz buffs you will still be able to right click to cancel, but that's it. The idea is to prevent addons from auto-cancelling buffs, but that's a far cry from looking at your list of buffs and manually removing one that you don't want. I've read some semi fixes to get around this change but I'm hoping that they will fix it so that even if mods can't cancel something without your input, you will still be able to right click it off yourself.