An Ode to Treants

Owltoid reached level 28 last night with a total played time under 6 hours.  I believe we’re off to SM until level 40 which shouldn’t take more than a day or two.

I’ve been thinking about my level 80 build.  I enjoy PvP and will likely be playing battleground and possibly an arena team.  I doubt I’ll ever do a 40-man or 25-man raid again, but 10-man raids are reasonably likely.  With those considerations in mind, this is my first attempt at a level 80 build:

http://www.wow-tools.org/talent-calculator/Druid/50320030253300332130333112310000000000000000000000000000003500330200000000000000000

I use that website because it’s not blocked at work.  Hopefully it’s up-to-date!  Please post comments on what the build is missing!

The first problem is that I don’t have insect swarm.  I’m not sure how much insect swarm is used in PvP and I am trying to stay away from dispellable forms of damage.  If I was to group with a warlock then it would be useful as one additional DoT (this is based on my knowledge of warlocks as of 3/2008… things may have changed drastically in the past months).

In the posted build I have intensity (3rd tier resto tree).  I’m assuming moonkins don’t care about spirit and just want as much intellect as possible.  If that’s the case, then that may be 3 wasted points.  I’m mostly worried about drain teams, running out of mana on long raid boss fights, or running out of mana in a 5 man group that has a tanking pally cruising through the place on autorun.  If anyone has a comment on spirit’s role in a moonkin build then let me know!

I have natural shapeshifer because I remember constantly kiting in my old arena days.  It’s a new world in WotLK and I may be able to exclude that talent and still have some mana leftover.  However, the added bonus of +4% spell damage in moonkin form is pretty nice.

Given how much I love treants, I’m very tempted to go for brambles.  The only problem is every class seems to have an AoE and I’d assume the treants will die very quickly.  Where before they could be a great help when used in the proper situation, I’m worried that now they’re nothing more than a cute perk.  Hopefully their stamina is buffed so that they can survive a few AoE’s and live out the 30 seconds of nature glory.

I’m missing 2 points in Wrath of Cenarius.  The problem is I don’t know what level 80 stats look like and what these abilities will really add.  If you assume an average arena battle is around 5 minutes of combat, and you know what a lvl 80 with decent gear looks like, then you can calculate exactly how much mana talents like Intensity and Dreamstate are giving back.  Often it’s such a small amount of mana that the ability is just not worth it.  Similar situation with Wrath of Cenarius that may just require analyzing my gear at 80 to see if the incremental bonus damage is worth it.

My last post was February 15, 2008, which I think coincided with my breakup with the girlfriend and quitting of WoW.  Since then I have conveniently forgotten about the addiction WoW brings and decided to hop back into the driver seat and begin again with the new expansion!

My RL friends all play on Dalaran and some don’t like horde so I believe ‘Simoncowell’, my 70 horde druid, will continue grazing and abstaining from combat.  However, I have created a new alliance druid named ‘Owltoid’ to continue the moonkin quest for domination.

Through the recruit-a-friend promotion, a friend is helping me level Owltoid using the 3x experience bonus.  It has been amazingly quick so far with level 20 being reached after 4 hours of playing last night.  I have a feeling level 40 is only about 5 hours away and level 60 likely being 10-15 hours after that.

For those who haven’t heard of the recruit-a-friend promotion it’s a system that an existing account can send an email asking someone to play WoW with them.  The email contains a key that once entered in the WoW website activates a trial account.  The cool thing about this account is that any toon on the new account that is within 4 levels of any toon on the existing account will gain 3x experience while grouped and nearby each other.  That is 3x the experience on everything, including quests.  Also, toons below 60 on either account can summon a toon on the other account once per hour.

With the help of my friend, we take his high level toon on one account, his low level toon on another account, and my low level toon on the new account, and powerlevel the crap out of instances.  With the 3x experience one run of Deadmines was about 1-1.5 levels.  One run of Stockades is about one level.  These clears only take about 20 minutes which leads to some insanely fast leveling times.  I’m sure we’ll slow down after we get through Scarlet Monastery, but I believe this system will work all the way up to 60.  For the higher level instance we can both play on our high level accounts while dual-boxing to allow our low level accounts to soak up the exp.

I see level 60 being within two weeks, and possibly much more quick than that.  I may try to recreate my horde pally in the alliance side using the same technique, but I’ll have to see how smooth this goes.  One other perk is that for every two levels my toon gains, I can grant the other players toon one level of immediate gain as long as the other toon is lower level than my toon.  So, if I level my druid up to 60 and my pally up to 60, then I can level my friends brand new toon from 1-60 in less than 5 minutes.  Talk about a nice /played time!

I think my friend gets a unique mount through the recruit-a-friend program which is just added bonus!