We've always had 2 druids tank Fankriss. We don't run with a lot of warriors and they handle the buggies a lot better. It's worked like a charm since the 1st kill. Don't think we've wiped once.

As for cat: We have 1 full Feral druid who gets to DPS semi-often. They just can't hang though. He's useful as a fill in tank(tanks surprisingly often), but for DPS they just can't compare. Still, as long as it's not holding the raid back somehow, having 1-2 around can't hurt as long as they're not shitheads about healing.

We have a few non-mana tide shaman, but they have healing gear and 99% of the time that's their job on raids.

While I wouldn't mind stacking warriors up to 8 per raid like most seem to do, I'm just not sure there's 8 warriors on Kilrogg I'm confident enough in to make someone in the guild lose a spot. Maybe raiding with 3-5 will stop us from progressing some day, but until then we're not going to be lowering our standards just to get another warrior.

http://ctprofiles.net/2715132 <- Tank in BWL gear. 17.7% dodge, 17.2% parry, 25.2% block and 430 defense.

We do have shadow priests though not in shadowform. Shadow priests can still heal adequately and keep shadow weaving up between heals.

We have well geared bear druids. Tanking bosses? only in MC and we have not been there in a few months. In Nax we have a bear tank help play 'goalie' on noth and they are often used on large trash pulls.

Not really. Would we take one over a rogue? Ofcourse not. Worse damage worse aggro etc.

No moonkin. That tree is a trainwreck. I do not think our druids would spec moonkin even if we wanted them to.

Out of 8 or so shaman I believe that we have 1 with mana tide but I believe all 8 have natures swiftness. I do not care what spec my guys bring to raids but I would not actively select a shaman with a stormstrike build as a full enhancement shaman brings much less to the raid then hybrid shaman do.

We are pretty open with talent builds. That said we use a 'sane' loot council so nonsense like cats getting belt of agony from C'thun is not going to happen.

Ever since we started Naxx we've had one of our druid spec feral.
For some fights we have found ourselves with some slack in healing, and he has helped out on dps.
Just depends on the fight. The only one, really, so far where having one person as feral has hurt has been patchwerk.

It depends though, if you have a line of warriors and rogues waiting outside your instance to get in.. perhaps you can completly specialize.
As a guild that runs a bit tighter, being able to have a bit of flexibility has really helped at times.
Short warriors for Faerlina one day, the druid tanked.

Optimal is a relative thing given your circumstances, and players.

The problem with including a bunch of feral loot in an instance is that it pisses every non-druid off (see: AQ).

On a side note we're considering letting an Enhancement Shaman DPS with Nightfall if we can get one made, just for fun.

As for druids v. warriors, warriors can get a ridiculous amount more avoidance - one of our tanks has something like 25% Block, 24% dodge, and 20% Parry.

1. Do you have any Shadow Priests in your raid? Does it help to have one, for added Warlock DPS?

We have 2 and at least 1 is present each raid. On average, we have 4-6 Warlocks so the added DPS increase is always welcome.

2. Do you have any Bear Tanks? Do they tank raid bosses?

We have a few Feral Druids but they haven't tanked much outside of Firesworns and Flamewakers and such.

3. Do you have any Cats? Would you take a Cat over a Rogue? Why (not)?

No Cat DPS Druids.

4. Do you have any Moonkin? Does the +3% spellcrit aura compensate for the lower DPS?

We have one Moonkin Druid. In theory, they work well in tandem with Holy Paladins, but since you need to spread Paladins out for Auras, I tend to stick Mages in the Moonkin's group. But then the Mages complain that they never get heals. :laugh: We don't force specs, but Moonkin really do suck.

5. Do you have any Protection Paladins? Do they actually tank Big Stuff?

We had one and, surprisingly, he tanked his fair share of stuff including Rajaxx adds, those stinger packs in AQ20 and even Onyxia once when both MTs died (the last 8ish percent).

6. Do you have any non-healing Shamans? What do they do? (I'm alliance, no experience with Shamans, but felt I had to include them here)

My guild is Alliance.

7. Or do you think any or even all of the above are ridiculous, and you should never have one of these in your raid?

Not at all except maybe a Moonkin Druid. :laugh:

I don't understand why people don't want to play their class the way it should be played. Melee hunters? Sure..that'll fly.

I started tanking as a joke of sorts, but then found some utility to it, but it's never something I look to do often. I've been selling the idea of dodge tanking for a while. Survival hunters are good for something! :P

We had a shadow priest, he was doing oke, but he started "not noticing" when we asked him to stay out of shadowform and heal, and stopped bidding on healing gear, so we kicked him. He was tolerated until then though, mainly because we usually have more than average number of warlocks in our raids.

We have a pure beartank specced druid and an omen/lotp one. They're happy to sit in heal gear and do what the other druids do, and happy to tank when asked to. We use them to tank on several fights, among others the bwl drakes (including vael), broodlord, sartura and fankriss. Funny thing though, on emps the ferals are healing, and seem to be a lot better at dodging blizzard and so on.. It's a general tendancy for these people to be better at adapting, especially in mobile fights. And anyways, it makes feral loot like malfurion/ghoul skin less wasted to have them along.

Our omen/lotp druid does dps on trash and easy bosses. Usually put in group with our 2 sealfate rogues.

We have no shamans, period, for obvious reasons (until BC at least).

Optimal builds for specific raid roles is nice, but it's the person behind the keyboard that counts really. We're a couple bosses into naxx, and still haven't reached a point where slightly less healing/mana from 1-2 druids has made us unable to complete an encounter.

On a side note, we've had a pala tank all of zg. Had no ferals and only one warrior in the raid, and he just completed his sulfaras 15mins before joining the raid, so he wanted to test it. Obviously that was rather interesting. Would never use pala tank on higher level stuff though.

1. Do you have any Shadow Priests in your raid? Does it help to have one, for added Warlock DPS?

No. We only bring two locks to instances nowadays and their DPS doesn't exactly validify losing another healer. Not to mention I'm extremely opposed to letting 1 person get the "fun" spec when the others have to bring the raidspec. It's not like we force specs and our healers love their jobs I'm sure, it's just that it only takes a little flame :)

2. Do you have any Bear Tanks? Do they tank raid bosses?

Not in spec or much in gear preferance, but we do employ Bears when we need them to fill temporary tank roles. We had a few good tanks leave and had to recruit some that weren't exactly up to par yet for tanking e.g one of Faerlina's followers. Rather have a Bear do it temporarily than potentially lose a good source of DPS. I think the best they've tanked is Garr, tho ;p. Horde doesn't get many variables for endgame raiding, BoS and Fear Ward do quite a bit in favor of Bears.

3. Do you have any Cats? Would you take a Cat over a Rogue? Why (not)?

Nope. Nope. It'll always be better to bring another rogue or another healer.

4. Do you have any Moonkin? Does the +3% spellcrit aura compensate for the lower DPS?

Nope. Nope. Our Druids all have warrior, mage, rogue or hunter alts already anyway :)

5. Do you have any Protection Paladins? Do they actually tank Big Stuff?

Not until the expansion. I doubt they'd get preference over Bears, either. Bears have loads better aggro generation and it doesn't take them their whole mana bar to do it either.

6. Do you have any non-healing Shamans? What do they do? (I'm alliance, no experience with Shamans, but felt I had to include them here)

We have a few Enhancement specced, but only for the better Windfury totems. They get put with the rogs and fury warriors. They heal like every other Shaman, tho :)

7. Or do you think any or even all of the above are ridiculous, and you should never have one of these in your raid?

I'm under the impression that there are no hybrids in this game. Going feral spec or elemental spec isn't exactly promoting your "hybrid-ness" either. However, with an extra healer on each side in the expansion, things may look up for Druids, Shamans and Paladins. I still don't think true endgame guilds will make space for "alternate" specs though.

Erh...your healers must really suck if they only heal their own group. For me personally as druid the group of someone is totally irrelevant, I heal whole raid, tanks or whatever my job is regardless of group.

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My raid group has a fairly "casual" attitude towards specs, but people generally have raid-friendly specs for most part. It's also a bit class-dependant, for example the priests have taken a policy where they enforce certain talents, i.e. full shadow priests are not welcome.

We don't have full feral druids at the moment, but some of us like me have good feral gear, so I can switch to tanking when it's needed. Which is quite often actually since 6th tank is needed particularly in AQ, and sometimes we even fail to fill 5 warrior slots. I have more than 12k armor and 7200 hp with buffs when tanking despite having 31 points in resto. I'd say being a fully capable resto druid which can change to a decent tank in one click (itemrack ftw :D) is much more useful than some full feral druid which would end up healing most of the time anyway. We've had druids with feral spec in the past, and it's been rather silly with me as resto druid tanking and them as feral druids healing (since my tanking stats have been better). We have one oomkin druid, who is nice and all, but more of a mascot than a really useful raider. We don't even take advantage of the aura, he's healing in boss fights. Our druids rarely go cat, I do it for MC trash or something when I feel like it but it has no real use for progression. I don't know much about our paladin specs, but none of them has any real tanking ambitions. Some of them tank in phase 1 Nefarian though, and it's proven to be very useful in our strategy.

Fearward: Yes. BoS: No.

Bear specced Druids cause more threat than Warriors :)