With the wealth of amazing gear choices available for druids in BWL / AQ I am curious what gear selection druids in other guilds are making.

Right now I am sporting the gear in my profile for day to day healing and cat / bear duties. I've started to scrape together a balance set and am working on finishing up my ideal healing and cat / bear sets, but with so many choices I am just curious what others have decided to go with.

Think, "if DKP is no concern, what would my ideal gear be for each role."

:)

I will try not write a novel.

There are so many sets that druids could potentially need for their playstyles, that is it disgusting. I'll try to mention the sets that I'm starting to work on now, which is by no means all-encompassing.

Restoration

8-piece
Right now I have 6/8 SR (thanks to the lovely BWL SR drought). Hopefully soon, that will be 8/8. There are a lot of great non-set restoration pieces, though most of them are sidegrades or trade one stat for another (spirit vs. mp5 and whatnot). I guess I could sit down and compare each slot to comparable pieces, but I actually have to do some work at work today - so I'll get back to you on this.

I'm not particularly impressed at the 5 and 8 piece bonuses for raiding, especially compared to the priest ones. Decreasing regrowth's cast time to 1.8 seconds is great in PvP, but I just don't use it often enough in a raiding situation. If I want a fast heal, NS+HT. If that's down, well, we're probably screwed anyway. And the 8 piece seems like it would be nice, but more often than not, my rejuvs to dps classes get wasted by a priest's flash heal or PoH. Seems ok for PvP I guess.

Long story short, I MUST have the 3-piece SR bonus, but beyond that, I'm probably willing to break up the set.

Neck
Currently sporting Angelista's Charm, would probably take C'Thun's quest reward over it.

Cloak
I remember seeing Cloak of Clarity as a datamined C'thun drop. If it exists, I'd want it.

Rings
Ring of the Martyr, Pure Elementium Band, Signet Ring, Cauterizing Band in that order.

Trinkets
Rejuv Gem, still love my DM trinket for fights with little spiking. Hibernation Crystal, ZHC, or Scarab Brooch depending on the situation.

Weapon/Offhand
I am getting done with the AQ gate questline, so Fang of Korialstrasz + Sartura's Might.

Idol
HT idol, though I do love slathering my rejuvs all over the raid.

I have enormous Word documents at home with my feral dps, hybrid, and balance sets, but I cannot remember everything from them off hand. I'll get back to you when I get home. Those are the other three sets I am working on. I hate tanking and I am awful at it, so I'm not collecting a stam/armor/tanking set right now.

Sorry this was long. :(

I have a question for the Druidicly inclined:

Last night on our (first!) Ossirian kill, we were lucky enough to get a Staff of the Ruins. We use a rough class priority rolling system and Warlocks and Mages were allowed to roll on it.

Statistically, it's nearly better in every category than the Staff of Dominance with a +1% chance to hit to boot.

Conceiveably, a Druid can put great use to this staff (especially if you subscribe to the line of thinking that gives Druids access and sometimes even priority to the SoD), so would it be appropriate to allow Druids to roll on this? The +1% hit can be argued to be of somewhat limited use to Druids.

I'm leaning towards 'yes', but I'd like to know your guys' opinions. :)



(We're not an MC guild yet. We're sticking with mastering the 20 man raids until we can get ~25-30 for MC).

If you're not an MC guild, I understand why you would give it to mages and warlocks first. But as an MC/BWL guild, I'd say it's fair game for any caster. I don't have a good balance weapon yet and I'd take it so i didn't have to steal a Staff of the Shadow Flame or Claw of Chromaggus.

I would pass on this staff even if I was given the option to roll on it. The chance to hit is going to benefit a class (mage / warlock) that is casting offensive spells all of the time and not the times that healing looks ok so let's drop a starfire / wrath / moonfire / etc.

For weapons I picked up SoD to replace Rod of the Ogre Magi pre-ZG. If you're doing 20 man instances a druid could pick up Jin'do's mace or Arlokk's staff and get roughly the same (or better) use out of it than they would from the Staff of the Ruins.

If you were raiding MC/BWL/AQ I would say it doesn't matter but seeing as you aren't, a mage or warlock won't find much, if anything better to use in that slot while a druid can.

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the quick replies. :) What you guys are saying makes sense and it was my logic when I gave the staff Mage/Warlock priority.

Most of our Druids are pining for a Will of Arlokk or Jin'do's Hexxer anyway. :) But on the other hand, I don't want to limit them strictly to healing loot either since they do have lives outside of raids (but I guess that becomes less of a problem since our Mages/Warlocks nearly all have epic caster weapons at this point so we can open up stuff such as the Staff of the Ruins to Druids).

My gear is simply a reflection of what kind of fight we're in.

If it's a quick trash pull, I go more +healing (750 give or take). If it's a longer fight, I go more mana/5 (75 give or take) and 8 piece stormrage. If it's a fight where I might need to go feral at some point, I wear what almost comes out to be my PvP set. Then of course you have various +FR or +NR encounters that have their own sets, and encounters where we need to be in bearform most of the time.

I'll dig up my CT Profile later for an idea of what I've managed to get my hands on so far.

I broke up 8/8 Stormrage the other day after looting Wasphide Gauntlets and Regenerating Belt of Vek'nilash. I try to keep a good balance between +heal and mp5 gear, along with a wealth of spirit. Recently, because of the insane efficiency of R4, I've been leaning more towards +heal than the other two. I'm pretty happy with my current gear(see ctprofile), save needing a new neck and a new ring.

As for the Staff of the Ruins question, it really depends on what your raid has. If you have 3 Mages/Warlocks still using some crappy blue or a Trindlehaven or something, then strict priority. If they have Mageblade/offhand or an equivalent 2h weapon, then you can relax it a bit.

Ah, here we go:
http://ctprofiles.net/4204

I cannot say enough good things about R4 and lots of +healing. For fights without a lot of spike damage, I can cast this nonstop (no cancels) and I lose maybe 25 to 50 mana per cast.

I have been focusing primarily on +healing gear since it started being introduced into the game in large quantities. It made such a huge difference in terms of mana efficiency I just kept stacking it on.

I think at this point, since I have +839 to healing, the best thing to do would be to balance that out with more +mp5 as I only have +29 mp5. Picking up Angelista's Charm, Sartura's Might, Exalted Signet, and Shroud of Pure Thought would tack and additional +22 mp5 on and I would net +9 healing with the option to mix and match to bump +heal up more.

One thing I was curious about is whether or not you healers with Lok'amir are going to upgrade to the Blessed Qiraji Augur Staff or stick with Lok. As a druid I was considering picking up the Warhammer at some point just because the +AP in forms is ridiculous, but the staff is pretty amazing for +heal and +mp5. Lok is just such an incredible weapon I just don't see myself banking it for a very long time unless Naxx just has some insane upgrades. If I did take the Augur staff it would end up being either totally situationally used or banked which in my opinion is a total waste.

I'm planning to pick up a staff and slap +30 damage on my Lok. It's just too disgusting of an upgrade to pass up. This probably won't happen anytime soon, though, as it'd be a noticably bigger upgrade for basically all of the other priests and druids.

We don't have the option since both weapons are priced the same, but clearly the BQAS is superior in terms of healing utility and the better bargain overall. (Of course if someone wants the option of having a good start on a +dmg set, the Lok can't be beat.)

Now, given the option, would I personally take the staff? If the upgrade cost was minimal, sure. Weapons can be switched and it'd be silly not to want added versatility. I'm not overly concerned though since we'll likely see something better in a few months.

Lok and BQAS are the same price for us as well and as we have no upgrade system in place I am not willing to shell out a good portion of my DKP for a minor upgrade only a few months after my last one.

Scepter of the False Prophet is insanely good and answers my questions about what I would upgrade to next. This weapon and Sartura's Might would give me +293 healing with a +55 heal enchant and 8 mp5, 16 sta, 25 int. So tempting... With such a massive upgrade from C'Thun it really makes me wonder what's in store for Naxxramas.

Somn I need to find a way to make you spend ~2400 more dkp than me between now and when we down C'thun. I'll settle for finishing my teir2 for now though :)

Dear gravy.

You can see my healing gear in my profile as well.

Basically I'm pretty happy with my current setup, except I'll be upgrading to Pure Elementium Band or Ring of the Martyr as soon as either drops. Also, once we get C'Thun down (working on Twin Emps now), I will upgrade to the Scepter of the False Prophet, Amulet of the Fallen God, and Cloak of Clarity (since I like how I look in pink =\ ), and I have the DKP to get all these :P.

I agree with Somnambulist that I'm pretty happy with my +healing (although I'm always looking to stack on more) but would like to upgrade my mana/5 sec a little. That's why I recently picked up Shard of the Scale, etc.

As far as breaking 8/8 stormrage, the 8/8 bonus is nice but gets wasted a lot I feel. Rejuv in general gets wasted a lot unless the healing assignments are very specific. However, instead of picking up various healing gear over their respective Stormrage pieces, I'll probably just wait for Naxx.