A Significant Change of HeartFollow

From the day I rolled my druid, I've been feral. I leveled feral, I hit 70 feral, I've run regular and heroic instances feral. I've run through Kara and Gruul's feral. I have always and still love the spec for all its ***-kicking potential. The only points I bothered with in any other talent tree were 12 points into Resto for Furor, that Healing Touch/damage increase talent (cannot remember name, Naturalist maybe?), Omen of Clarity and 1 point into shapeshifting mana cost reduction.

Upon hitting Outlands I began the quest grind and my levels increased rapidly. One thing I came to find though was that a good half of all my quest rewards did nothing for me as feral. There were, however, a lot of good leather and cloth boomkin/resto oriented pieces of gear. So as I progressed through Outlands early on I made a point of taking whatever piece of gear looked good for a moonkin or resto druid when there was no good feral choice (or the feral choice was not an upgrade).

Over time my bank began to overflow with green caster gear. But I never re-specced. Upon hitting 70 I started working on my feral dps and tanking sets of gear, and this poorly constructed moonkin/resto set just sat there in the bank, collecting dust. One time I re-specced to a heavy balance build, put all the gear on, and after 10 minutes was quite disappointed with the stats and overall results. And back into the bank the gear went.

About two weeks ago I was in a heroic with some guildies and some nice healing piece dropped. Nobody wanted it and it was slated for DE, but before it went to the DEer someone said, "hey, take that for your resto set." Now, I didn't even really "have" an actual resto set, as healing was something I never really gave much thought. I always figured if anything I'd go boomkin and blow sh*t up. But I opted to take the piece, and here is where it all began.

I ran more heroics with guildies over the course of the week and more healing gear dropped that was not an upgrade for our healer. Rather than have it DE'd, they let me have it. I ran Kara with my guild and more healing gear dropped that they insisted I take. So I took it. Before long, it suddenly became a chief goal of mine to compile a true healing druid set of gear.

And now, two weeks later, I'm sitting at +1124 healing, about 400 mana regen and I've re-specced to help guildies through some instances and, to my chagrin, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. A real nice change of pace in fact. In my heart I'll always be feral, but you know, for the first time, resto has now become a real viable option for me.

I love versatility.

I can totally understand your feeling! I leveled feral, when I hit 70 I was starting to work on my tanking/dps gear and I switched guild. They asked me if I minded going healer (I didn't mind since the "least equiped" feral was in t5!). Since then, I have a blast healing. I still worked on my tanking gear (and I will still work on it) but now I really love resto. Except when I'm due to do my dailies! :D

I went restokin for 1 or 2 weeks. It went well but I'm not sure I'm that useful for my current guild (working Gruul and Mag, cant say really on farm since we need 10-12 pug people to fill the group ;)); I prefer being full tree in that case.

But yes... being resto is fun! And when your kit is good enough, you may do "crappy" dps in instances when not healing (I do that even on some pull of heroics!) =)

I haven't really started tanking heroics. Last time it was with guildmates well geared and I had.. 20k armor! That made things intersting to say the least. I should try it again now! but I love the versatility, but I hate having to gem/enchant that many armor kits :D

Probably 400 outside 5SR, which still ain't too shabby.