:jerry:

Fact: Feral druids take Heart of the Wild so they can brag about how much mana they have.

Innervate plz. :angry:

I suspect we'll see a lot of respeccing back to heavier healing builds among many classes, including shamans who have gone more intoi Elemental talents lately, once A'Q comes out. It's just the nature of things. When you're still learning encounters and need every little advantage, you try to squeeze every possible advantage out of your character. As you master the fights, there's all sorts of margin for error. We had a half dozen tanks respec into Defiance for Vael and Broodlord in July, and today Vael usually dies before the third tank does.

Ultimately, it's a game, and you should go with what's fun for you. If you play a lot and spend 80% of your time PvPing or farming and 20% of your time raiding, a pure healbot spec probably doesn't make much sense. But on the flip side, most of us are team players, and there's a lot of fun to be had in learning new encounters. Feeling like you're dead weight or otherwise a hinderance isn't much fun, and so you see a lot of PvE respeccing when we hit a wall, though it's never been something we've required.

The tough question is at what point does taking a druid become preferable to bringing another rogue or warrior.

If a druid can do DPS at 70% the level of a rogue and heal at about 50% the power of a priest, that makes a good use of a raid slot.

But then again, EJ like most guilds has 8 rogues ready to go at any given point for a raid, a good handful of mages/warlocks, and 2-5 druids at most. While a druid may be able to do solid DPS with a feral or balance build, it's not exactly a unique role that is needing to be filled.

I have always believed a raid is best off if most it's members try to be good at one aspect. Specialization is important when we are getting more bosses that create extremes(huge crits, huge resistances, huge amounts of armor).

Now when we start getting more bosses that have lots of variables to deal with(nef, razorgore) I think having more flexible toons like druids will be helpful. I am not sure where blizzard is going with bosses in instances but I have to imagine they are getting close to done with the broodlord type boss where it is fairly straight forward. I think flexibility will be necessary in the future and I will have to change my view on what is best for a raid. Right now though I feel raid is better off with resto shaman and druid than enh shaman and balanced druids. Ofcouse maybe I am entirely wrong on this.

Even though it would be near impossible to fit into a high dps feral build, it would be sweet if they would change the sublety talent in restoration to also effect damage in cat form.

Cower works well for me, but I wouldn't mind that suggestion going through and becoming reality.

Cower is utter crap against BWL bosses. Rogues have to use vanish, completely wiping aggro, to avoid getting smeared. We don't have that type of option.

This is one thing that interests me. Are druids generally delegated to healers because they are limited by their class at performing other roles, or because a disproportionately low number of healers compared to DPS classes results in druids being used to fill that role? Perhaps it's both. However, if it's only the latter, then the solution is more healers, not pigeonholing druids. I think people might neglect the support abilities of the feral and (possibly) balance druid just because of a general lack of healers.

There's also inertia. As has been said before, druids aren't adequately geared for feral, and that is used as a reason to not let them go feral. But they're only not geared because they weren't able to go feral in the first place, or were chastised for rolling on feral gear. And besides gear, there's the mindset that druids are only good at healing, which was generally accepted before 1.8 but has been brought into question since the patch.

A cower is a feint. Literally -- zero difference from the rogue version. For a druid, it removes 600 damage worth of threat, effectively allowing you to do 60 DPS more than you otherwise could if you use it every time it's up.

It's ok, but it doesn't scale, and druids have no passive aggro-reduction (a la rogues, and many mages/warlocks), and no way of wiping aggro entirely (a la rogues and hunters). Aggro is the hard cap on the viability of druid DPS, especially for Horde.

So it would likely require keeping a close eye on DM and making sure that I'm not outdamaging the warriors.
Of course, this is off in the distant future, when I CAN outdamage warriors :P

:(