Balancemoon

but when I said they used 98%-100% of their abilities, I meant even the most rarely used ones have a time when they are useful and thus count them. I pointed out that smite for the shadow priest was one that you could class nearly useless because shadow priests never used it, but it's only one ability, and you can live with that, but it's a completely different thing if 2/3 of the holy tree was like smite, you see what I mean? for balance druid's for e.g 2/3 of the feral tree is just like smite, so we're not just talking one ability but MOST of the feral school that never gets used.

I know probably many of you play druids and re-spec to try other builds, I levelled one in each build, and what I'm wishing to re-capture for the balance build is what it's like level 20-50, where you do use your nukes but do occasionally melee also, in the early levels you did melee for damage when you were OOM if you levelled balance, however it's different at end-game, all your damage is from nuking which I think is fine. So if you want that totally versatile experience, you must find another reason for balance to melee other than to do damage, because it is well sorted, something like getting mana regen for meleeing in a feral form so once every 10 odd mins of nuking, it actually pays to shift to cat and bear and melee for aboutu 10-15s as an alternative to drinking, that is just one way you could do it, there are many ways you could just get that bit actually involved.

For restoration, I remember the pre-TBC days when 0/20/31 was very much useable and viable, not that the point is to make the feral tree viable for resto more as into once more have the feral SCHOOL of more use. Doing +healing gear with +damage has made the only realistic damage option for resto shaman and resto druids as elemental and balance respectively, freezing out the enhancement and feral schools. For Shaman it's not so bad because most enhancement abilities are totems and utilities anyway, but for druid, most feral abilities are actually abilities. Where balance has no use for doing more melee damage, restoration actually does, so it's fix is much simpler fif blizzard cared about maintaining the diversity.

All said and done, they should look at all the classes from this perspective, it can only help improve design and experience.
But then I think it appears like that, but if they actually tried it won't be that hard. As it stands feral is fine if attack poweer/spell damage and healing were unified, you'd have to remove NI as it would have no relevance anymore, but if you can get +damage/healing in equal quantities on gear, why not +attack power/healing as a standard stat? What makes it fine on shadow priests or elemental shaman but overpowered on enhancement shaman, ret paladins or feral druids? in fact why not unify the stats for all three and make up the difference in the co-efficients, you reduce the complexity in generating most items of gear and finally your alternative roles as shaman/palas and druids see a bit more light of day because of their boosted power HOWEVER, it won't make much of a difference.

1. Balance even with spell crit also being melee crit and spell power also being melee power, would do about 1/3 of it's spell damage while meleeing, so altho it's meleeing will now be a lot more powerful than it is currently it means nothing: remember the fire mage using frost spells analysis made earlier? The same carries true for Feral druids who's attack power would also mean their spell damage was boosted, you won't see them relying on starfire and wrath now would you, but you may see them use the only two balance spells that are useless to them a tad more often. Same with Enhancement on ELemental, and Elemental on Enhancement, Enhancement has no melee ability that's trainable, Stormstrike is the only one and for shaman you need alot of points in Enhancement, however your shocks as enhancement will do more damage, but still no where near elemental shaman damage even though you will use them. I think the game can live with that and compensate for it.

What you will achieve though is finally people might start toying with the idea of Feral/balance specs once more or enhancement/Elemental specs..we see a lot more of enh/ele specs than we do feral/balance or balance feral. But to make balance TALENT TREE more attractive to feral you'd have to do something like this mock tree.

War Tools :: Talent tree Druid trees with full synergy between each tree

check out also what Feral can do for balance, but note it's just to show a way you could boost this viability between the two schools if you made feral forms give mana on melee to balance druids. Off course it would be a balance talent that allows you to gain mana from meleeing in feral forms, making most of the Feral school useable even though very occasionally. The feral tree could then have bits in it for balance that made mana on melee in forms actually useable in raids.

2. Healing specs will have attack power to use so holy paladins would do melee, or resto druids would be able to melee a bit..erm...seeing that currently you already allow them to be able to nuke a bit thanks to the healing gear change, I'm sorry what's so bad about making them able to melee, afterall a resto druid is either meleeing or nuking, and with this change, he at least will have as a good reason to off-spec feral instead of balance, which choice he makes would depend on which playstyle he prefers. And don't say that would make the existin x/11/4x resto spec even more popular, because a) that's not a bad thing at all and b) the reason for it's popularity is going because Feral charge is now at 20 pts.

3. As addressed earlier, what is so imbalanced about a melee based dps class build having his gear boost healing as well as attack power? afterall we don't consider shadow priests also a dps class to be imbalanced because it's gear also boosts healing, the damage and healing number being the same, neither do we complain that a mage's +spell damage gear boosts all his schools and not just the one he specs in. Off course we do, just like shadow priest healing is quite poor without holy talents, like wise will enhancement shaman or feral druids or ret paladin healing be poor even if it was just one unified stat.

So, my conclusion is it actually wouldn't be that complicated to do, just adjust the co-efficients so there is higher plus healing healing specs gain from the gear. However, note that just a power stat unification will not make balance druids use the majority of their feral cat/bear form abilities as they don't need feral for damage you'd have to give that particular build some incentive to melee once in a while, something that helps casting like getting mana back on meleeing so once in a while it benefits their role to shift and melee a bit. Fortunately Enhancement shaman don't have that problem, all elemental abilities with the exception of lightning bolt itself sees use by enh shaman, and as mentioned before, elemental shaman always have use for enhancement abilities as they are all utilities. Just the balance / feral relationship mainly.

Do this and you complete the druids, they finally have the last jigsaw piece fixed.