My guild is fairly new but we know we are mid teir and where that puts us on the totem, we encourage members that want to move on to do so just let us know and give us reasonable time to fill their slots, but lately we have had a huge turnover on druids because of other guilds scalping them, and yes they were targeted specificaly, lost 5 in 30 min to the same guild.

The problem is there just arent enough 60 druids on the server to go around, all the 60s seem to be rerolled core members of other guilds or feral pvpers, there are exactly 5 unguilded, active lvl 60 restos, 3 are questers, 1 i cant figure out what language he speaks, the other 1 just went thru a nasty guild break up and is thinking of quitting the game.

We thought about lowering our recruit cap to 50 but then we will still have to deal with gearing, attunning, etc, we have a few of our core members rerolling but without some serious power leveling thats will be 2+ weeks away and then they still have to learn2play the class. The question is, wth should we do? Im out of ideas just wondering if what you guys would do.

why did your druids leave in the first place?

I am sure there are more than 5 unguilded active druids.

If you feel you really want more druids, have people in your guild reroll to a druid.

Ask why the 5 druids left your guild for the same guild. Make changes so other people don't feel the same way.

Sorry for your situation, but there doesn't seem much you can do for the short-term.

They went to a twin emp guild while we havent downed nef yet. Like i said we are very new, made up of alot of pp that took the summer off from raiding to fight burnout and get away from the summer break crowd.

On my server there was a time when Druids were neigh impossible to find and what happened was everyone who leveled an alt or was new rolled a druid and now there are a ton of them floating around. Class imbalance for your faction, if your server is anything like mine, should even itself out over time. It's not really a solution for you, but it is something to consider. Your problems are unlikely to go away until either A. The guilds poaching you no longer need druids, B. Your server rebalances classes naturally over time or C. You have some extremely loyal members re-roll druids..

Forced specs, lower priority on drops, burn-out - all potential reasons for druids to bail.

-edit-
Oops, and that.

Policy complaints or personal complaints (issues with the raid leader or some other authority figure) cause most guild defections. Have you tried asking your ex-Druids where their issues were so that you can correct them for future Druids?

Come advertise on Ursin. We have so many druids its disgusting. Never understood why everyone else says druids are underplayed, they must all be on my server.

I think he's looking for healer druids, and I think he doesn't believe that current non-resto druids are willing to conform to that. Most active non-guilded feral/balance druids are usually PvPers or casuals and might not be raidmaterial in the first place.

Legatio, aside from the things you've said already, you might try cross server recruiting. I expect it to be a little more difficult for a "mid-tier" guild (what is that, like... Nefarian or something nowadays?) but the official recruitment board and druid forums might be a place to start. Surely there's a few decent resto druids out there looking for a home.

Oh and deffo get started on what caused them to move to another guild. Promises of more epics, being allowed to go off-specs, being allowed to loot certain items or just generally bummed out on how they were treated as healers in your guild?

*edit* bloody hell you lot type and post too fast

With a server name like Ursin? Who'd've thunk?

I do not think that a guild in your position can mandate specs - or should do so. You are not a top guild on the bleeding edge of progression. The content you do does not require you to mandate specs. My druid was the only healer in scholo at level 56 with full feral spec and gear and we did not wipe once - not because I am that great but because the instance is easy. Any instance that can be pugged (and BWL is pugged these days) can be done with any spec.

Second, being a full resto druid means that you are probably a hardcore raider because you arent good for much else. My druid (now full resto) can't kill anything. If you are willing to spec for raid progression you would also join a progression guild. A longterm member should have enough loyalty to not jump on the first better guild knocking on his door but you cannot realistically expect a lot of loyalty from new recruits.

So, my advice would be. Don't talk about "resto spec" when recruiting druids. Recruit them and build loyalty. Make it clear that what matters is performance, not spec. By the time you hit hard content they will probably spec at least part resto because else they will fall behind.

There are different types of feral and balance druids as well. One kind will always want to stay in cat form or as a moonkin doing loldps. They don't pick up healing gear and complain mightily (or flat-out refuse) when asked to heal. The other kind maintains multiple good sets of gear and is willing to fill whatever raid role they are needed for, be it DPS, off-tanking, healing, or some mix of both. If you prefer resto druids, but none are available, then you probably want to expand your search to include "off-spec" druids of the second kind. The first kind will only hurt you though.

Good raiding druids are plain hard to find. Cenarion Circle had something like ten, maybe twelve really high-caliber Horde druids in its entire history from launch to July 2006, during which it was one of the most populated servers in the game.

The fact that it's an RP server may have something to do with that, though...I am going to post a thread about my theory in this regard.

Have members reroll. Levelling a druid now is cake, especially compared to pre-1.8.

Leveling a druid has gotten better... it's still pretty tedious compared to other classes. On a reroll, where the player should already know where the quests are it can go a crapton faster with a rogue helping. When I rolled an alt druid for my guild that was really short of them (only to leave the guild shortly after that project was complete for a guild that has no shortage of druids) it really went so much faster because I knew which quests to pick up and which to skip (linken), and I had a couple of rogues that would stealth to the back of a cave and put a hurting on the mini-quest boss for me.

My hunter on the other hand, was able to make about the same progress autoshotting mobs I needed to farm anyways, like rock elementals in the badlands. Much much easier and I didn't need help to make the same progress, and I had a bunch of elemental earth at the end of it.

Kaubel hit the nail on the head with this post. Someone else also said, people lvl hybrids to 60 then find out hybrid is spelled healbot in endgame raiding and quit. Thats pretty accurate too. I'm one of those offspecc druids who is completely willing to raid heal but I won't respecc, and I expect to be able to acquire some DPS gear sooner rather then later. I don't wanna be first, second, or even third in line for DPS gear. But I sure as hell ain't waiting till last either.

Although I do admit, the idea of a tree specc druid is tempting me to go resto for the first time in about a year of WOW. I think the build is gonna be a HELL of a lot better then some people are thinking.

Or maybe its not that much fun to spam HT rank 4 for three hours. Thats why I'm thinking about taking up raid healing again in the expac, it looks like it might be interesting.

I don't think it takes a terrible amount of skill to raid as a druid. At least raid at a skill lvl that you won't be revealed as a dolt. Yes, maybe to be exceptional it takes some skill, but you can get by with very little attention if you don't care much and not many people will notice.

Sulliwan has it about right. There's an impressive array of versatility forms can offer for raids regardless of spec, but unless you really do hunker down and spend a month or two as Rest you won't grasp the proper proportion of energy that should be spend trying to get them to "work." Feral kiddies who default to a form and only shift out in extremis remain the most irritating class offspec. I hibernate any I see, just out of spite for watching them overrun the druid class forums shortly after 1.8.

I've migrated off ED, but in my stay I was quite convinced that certain people simply were immune to persuasion. The dps->healbot bait and switch seems to be fairly rough relative to what paladins or shammies go through.

I rerolled a druid because we were short of them, and have raided a fair bit with it, but I have to say I still find the class frustrating - I guess it stems from the old "jack of all trades, master of none" thing, but I never felt able to be a decent raid healer without 35 points in resto, which pretty severely gimps a lot of the fun you can have solo-ing/PvPing.

That said I think Druids and Warlocks appear to be the "least-played" horde classes across a number of servers, I can't help but think that the Druid problem is mainly down to race limitations i.e. only Taurens. I sure as heck didn't want to do the first 30 levels of Mulgore/Barrens all over again, so I got the guy powerlevelled & picked him up at level 45.

Not sure if it's totally inappropriate to recommend such a course of action, but it doesn't take much of a guild whiparound to pay the $200 of 1-60 powerlevelling if a couple of your guys are willing to main-switch. And it's fairly easy to gear a druid up pretty well pretty quickly just from running some rapid ZG.

The druid problem seems present in many realms. My guild has most of the time had druid recruitment open. We do have few active raiding druids, and altho they're not forced to spec resto, they are expected to stfuheal during raids.

We have allways had a high turnover of druids and its been a variety of reasons, we dont force spec but at the time spec may be taken into account as to who goes to raid. We can find a spot for a moonkin or cat but not multiple.
I would say at least 1/3 of our druids have just retired from disatisfaction with the class or are still around but mostly non raiding. Sometimes the moons align and you get 7 or 8 druids turn up for a raid but often we are down to 1-3. It didnt help we lost our druid lead after disaggrements about her cherrypicking raids and that when she formed a new Guild with 2 other Ex -Guildies a month later we lost 3 more druids.

The problem arises when people realize that what they play is not a hybrid but a healer. The people who can cope with that are the ones that are still raiding today, and the ones that can't are the kittens and owls you see running around in any random battlegrounds group.

We already have one druid with 40 splinters of Atiesh and another one just started on his. I love our druids. You should love your druids, too.