If I'm gonna be wrong, I'm gonna assume the worst./ Post 4.01: Druid

I have to hand it to Blizzard. Tree heals (although it may be a mistake) as of now, are pretty freakin' sweet. This may come from the fact that now, some healing classes (particularly Pally and Druids) are completely OP. With my gear (about a 5.8 gs) and the mana talents (because at this moment, longevity is important to me first, since I know I can outheal my gear) I'm sitting at a comfortable 43k mana unbuffed. Even when faced with a need for massive heals, I still barely get close to the 40k mark. Honestly, this will change when I actually hop into ICC tonight, so I haven't changed around my spec yet.

Efflorescence is by far my favorite new thing for restoration druids. It's powerful; when coupled with Swiftmend Glyph, it's completely worth it, and it also takes advantage of our mastery (because there has to be a hot for Swiftmend to work). It's also incredibly pretty.

I have had a difficult time adjusting to relying solely on HOTs for raid and group heals. I also have a difficult time remembering to keep Lifebloom up on the tank (I miss Healbot btw. It's literally hiding from me...). Because, as far as my raid's composition goes, I'll never be a tank healer, using things like Nourish and Healing Touch are pretty much out of the question at the moment. Nourish sucks now. At least without 200 extra mastery points (my friend loves nourish on tanks with 200 mastery points <.<). It's a nearly 2+ second cast and does half the healing it used to. Because I don't plan on tank healing, it is a waste. I do like that Nourish renews Lifebloom, and this coupled with the new Replenishment, makes it worth it.

My stats for the most part, haven't really changed. I switched out a cloth piece for a leather piece that ended up exchanging haste for crit. I was thinking about maybe reforging it, but because of the HOT's ability to crit now, it's not entirely useless. My HOTS actually crit a lot. Because I haven't been using Parrot or MSBT, I got to see each individual HOT blow up on my screen with the normal Blizz battle text. Omg. Is that annoying, having green everywhere. But damn! My HOTS crit a lot. :O

For the most part, I'm not having any problems at all. The first run ( a guild run through H FoS) was a little shaky for me, simply because I kept wanting to toss Nourish out after a Rejuvenation. Just plain habbit. Also, having to rely on Clique with the Blizzard unit frames was no fun. I personally don't like Clique, but it was all that would work. I switched to VuhDo because both Healbot and Grid aren't working. VuhDo is pretty nice. A good combination of both Healbot and Grid, but I need to figure out if I can change the health bars to Class colors. It's driving me crazy that it's all green. (I rely heavily on Class colors to know who is possibly doing what, and also, it helps me AOE heal the melee.)

We'll see how tonight goes. I'm not sure if we'll delve into Heroics or just do a basic run to see how the new stuff goes. One of the Tanks/Raid leaders mentioned to me getting down 10/12 tonight, but that means we're not doing heroics...I think.

Some negatives:
I still miss Tree form a lot. I feel really bulky as a tauren. I miss that little waddle.
My Gm needs to suck it. I'm sick of him defending Blizzard's decision to craft classes in preparation for Cataclysm, but expect us to continue in ICC content. Healing is all about reflex. The health increase hasn't really deterred the damage people take, so we still have to heal to some extent with the old style. As a druid this hasn't been much of a problem. But...as a shaman. well that's for another post.
I also have no reason as a druid at the moment to DPS. Actually even if I took the Fury of Stormrage talent (wrath procs free starfire) to reach the extra Clearcasting proc talent, it doesn't proc because I use more Starfire. It's because I use Lifebloom. Really dumb...

um btw.