PvP server! Tank = PvE. I honestly rolled my druid to PvP. I think I started my account on day 8 or 9, Comp USA screwed up the pre-orders. I will admit that my perceptions of this game were tainted by playing Warcraft II & Warcraft III, Druids of the Talon and Druids of the Claw. ( And Malfurian Stormrage. I don't remember him being a healer at all). I was expecting the end game to be alot more Warcraft, and alot LESS Everquest.

1) And I don't think I claimed I wanted to tank. However, now, tanking is the only area where a druid's hybritity comes into play.

I actually leveled mostly balance spec. Pre-Nerfs. You could kill people with JUST roots (and a stack of mana potions). Hurricane used to be an instant cast 10 second AOE. Fire and Forget. You could root people in it. >:)
I switched to feral, once balance was nerfed, to get to 60 as fast as possible. Gotta get to 60 before the hero classes come out! It's gonna be awesome! Started doing PvE outa boredom. There's a whole lot of PvE happenin on my PvP server!

Here's the main issue behind lolferal bitching:
Blizz ninja changed the druid class description.
It USED to say "Forms may be considered as powerful as thier parent classes but not as versatile". NOW it says "Animal forms are not as powerful as their counterpart classes". They also added "primary healer". I don't know when this was changed. But if I wanted to be a primary healer, I would have picked preist.

You see, there was hope. Blizcon: "Druids are the one true Hybrid". The constant "cat form base dps increased" ect, the +ap weapons meant to close the gap...

Shadow Priests? Iono. Did Bliz ninja change thier class description too?


Have you seen Dreadnaught? 15.5k AC is a rare occurance now... Let's wait a month and see if that's still true.

I meant it as an illustration on how unrealistic the common "in equal gear a druid can be just as good". We have Caydem to thank for this by the way. The gear simply doesn't exist. I'm too tired to explain this correctly, Hugehoss said something like, a bear tank could keep up if only they had added a hive tunneler set instead of just a few pieces. That's fine for Bear druids. But could you imagine your guild's reaction to having to deal with a moonkin set, a kitty set, a bear set, and healer set dropping in each instance (so that druids could keep equal footing with thier mage/rogue/warrior/preist counterparts)?

That wasn't what I was going for really.

Our level 20 quest giver is in the game, with nice little animation prowling around. The quest is ALMOST done. It's part and parcel of feeling like an incomplete class. Ie: Cheetah being a placeholder for two years until it was finally anounced that it wasn't important enough an issue to change any time soon.

Actually, at level 25 the set looked amazing. +str, +agi, +damage. Far from useless. Definately NOT a healbot set.

I beleive the pally tier 2 actually had +STR and +spell damage added to it. The druid set had it stripped away.

The same description said:
"Primary Healers"

While the paladin description used to include the phrases:
"They are tanks overall"
"Powerful melee class"
"Some healing and buffs"

We were also told:
"There will be no support classess in World of warcraft"

Which was then followed up in blue at the time of the Paladin review by:
"Paladins were intended to be a strong support class"

Paladins got it just as bad as druids, arguably worse, and the class description was a MAJOR bitching point.

As I said its a whole bunch of "Grass is greener" rubbish, and the two druids you cite as "The ferals" should have rolled warriors. They were not "Embracing their hybridity" they want to tank, they wanted to tank every fight all the time 100% of encounters except where blizzard made it excessivley difficult (Nefarian). When they could no longer tank, did they "embrace their hybridity"? No, instead one quit WoW. Yes they are very good players, but in the end Mootan was just another LoLferal who quit when he was told to heal. Hugehoss talks alot more sense and I take his opinions more seriously.

A Shadow Priest does give you flexibility, I'll give you that. But again, if you're only fielding 2-3 Warlocks, the benefit of Shadow Weaving and VE is marginal. Again as I said in my original post, if I want more healing I'll bring a healing-specced healer, and if I want more DPS I'll bring a DPS class. A Shadow Priest can do both, but in a more limited capacity.

We had two druids who started playing the day WoW came out who rolled thier druids to be tanks. One of them didn't even train cat form until a few months after hitting 60 because he wanted to be a bear, not a cat.

I don't quite understand why you ask that, seeing that you rolled your Paladin just for tanking, too?

Mhm,
I played alot of games prior to WoW, and the general palaidn template was a class that tanked as least as effectively as a warrior, but which had no option to deal damage. Instead of a DD option paladins came with a small number of buffs or a very inefficient heal. When I read the description of hte WoW paladin it seemed to match up so on day 1 I rolled my paladin and played it as a tank, very sucessfully, until I hit MC. At that point It bacame clear that I wasnt rally a tank class, although I was able to tank and help out ocassionally. I adapted and aceptd my role because I didnt have the time or inclination to reroll a warrior.

Essentially I rolled a paladin to be a tank, somewhat in ignorance, and somewhat decieved by the fact paladins could tank at the time pretty damn well with the exception of bossess that needed a taunt. The same simply isnt true of druids, druids were NEVER sold as tanks, they were sold as primary healers with some shape-shifting ability, druids have no background in previous games as tanks either, there is no presidence of a game where druids are the second best tanking class to my knowledge.

Basically, druids who rolled on day 1 of release had no reason to presume they would be as good at tanking as they are, certainly not to the extent they would play their class almost as if it only had bearform, which some posters (Mootan) appear to do. So why would they roll a druid to tank and nothing else ?

At the risk of Thread Necromancy, I hesitantly put forth the theory that a little known game called Warcraft III
might be semi responsable for this.

http://www.battle.net/war3/nightelf/...ftheclaw.shtml

While I believe anyone who rolled their druid to perform a single role is a bit silly, it's a fair assumption to think that Blizzard had the intention of making them viable tanks due to their class description. The same goes for Paladins really, but Paladins got hosed in that regard.

I think a lot of classes got hosed when it comes to raiding.

Warlocks: Supposed to be super debuffers, but they become little more than shadowmages with more DoTs.
Druids: Jack-of-all-trades that becomes either a healbot or a gimmick.
Paladins: A different kind of jack who become healbot uber-buffers.
Rogues: The supposed number one DPS class that ends being matched by most other DPS classes and offers little else to the raid.

It comes down to this: I can do one job very well, or I can try to do what another class does better.

You're gonna put a paladin on the list for classes who get hosed for raiding but not shaman? /boggle

Min/maxing for the win.