Balancemoon

You know I never liked that in TBC, of the 5 new abilities given as trainable, the feral ones were only relevant to feral and for all intents and purposes useless to resto and especially balance druids. I hope they don't repeat the same thing, already lock-jaw as trainable holds little relevance to balance or restoration, and tbh, neither does nourish to feral or balance much, although healing is always useful.

That underlines a deeper concern with druids that has yet to be addressed by blizzard. Are we ever going to see the class really making use of all it's abilities? I don't mean have equal importance to all it's abilities, just have some use even occasional use for those dead non-relevant to build ones , or is balance for e.g. forever doomed to have the feral school useless because meleeing bringing some relevance to spell casting cannot be found(like claw/maim/rip/maul/ etc and 33% of the school's arsenal is useless to balance/resto).

When the Public Discussion was doing it's 4-pager on itemisation in WotLK, it got me thinking again, how merging spell damage and attack power ntos simply one power rating would oddly give a more powerful meleeing to the likes of balance and resto druids making the use of feral forms "less useless" to them. For balance it would mean nothing, because unless melee was as powerful as spell casting, it would almost seldom be used for the purposes of doing damage, so if you want to make balance use the feral school, meleeing in feral forms will have to do something that helps spell caating (like gain mana on melee) so balance druids use it for that spell casting boost rather than for damage. and it would be something they use occasionally. The idea is to make use of all your abilities not make balance good at feral combat, so it's something that should only make sense for a balance druid to do once in long while. Afterall, using feral forms and by extension a lot of the feral school abilities once in a while like once every 5 fights or every 5mins for about 15secs is better than never using it at all and if you really think of it, that is roughly how often a feral druid uses a healing spell or a balance one, the same should be fixed so it holds true for balance druids on feral school abilities (trainable abilities i'm talking here, not talents).

The only thing I can think of that could make meleeing in feral forms help spell casting was if it gave the balance druid mana on meleeing in feral forms. Restoration though doesn't have that problem, because it actaully needs to do damage. Currently with +healing gear sharing some spell damage, it pre-disposes resto to nuking via balance, so restoration now has little use for most of the feral school, but unlike balance, it's solution is simply make the same adjustment for melee attack power that spell healing did for damage on gear, which would off course if they merged attack power, spell damage and spell healing into one stat called "power" would intrinsically solve, otherwise they could put in a spell damage to attack power conversion in the feral tree, so resto healing gear's a spell damage bit gets converted to attack power once more -recreating a reason to spec resto feral without overloading the top half of feral with melee damage. Balance druids wouldn't really care about that conversion because even if every spell damage point gave 1 attack power, you would still not be meleeing in a fight to cause damage way too low, but if you had a talent in the balance tree that gave mana on melee based on attack power or melee damage when in feral forms, then you'd be tempted to boost this in the feral tree, and even synergy between balance and feral could be created by making the feral tree provide a useful in raid way of doing this..(just pondering here).

The whole point is that it would be nice for all druid abilities to continue to be relevant to all builds even at end game, even though abilities in your secondary spell schools will be only occasionally used, the fact that they'd be more used is an improvement on the present.

So I go back to the original point of the new spell abilities. Whiles as a feral druid, it's nice to have the Lock-jaws, the Maim's and the Lacerates, as a balance druid or resto do I have yet again less abilities in WotLK like TBC all over again? Or will blizzard introduce trainable abilities from each school that all spell schools can use. For e.g. if Play dead were given, as a feral ability, all school specialist could use it. If Animal Call (i.e. call a beast within sight to fight for you for x secs) were given as a feral ability, all builds could use. Lock jaw could go to the talent tree instead or alternatively, give both balance and resto and extra ability in their talent tree even though that's one point more to spend. [e.g. starfall/flourish/typhoon]

Revive is a resto talent all schools will be able to use. Typhoon though really only making sense for balance, will see some use by ferals and resto druids in solo or in pvp and even sometimes in instances unlike Lock-jaw, who like maim and lacerate will never see the light of day on a balance or restoration druid.

So until blizzard actually make an effort to make balance and resto have relevance in the feral tree, I'm afraid balance and restoration druids will always be about 2/3 of a class, and feral the only more or less complete.