Mosty, feral druids are having their cake and eating it to on live when it comes to healing simply because the current restoration tree is.. bad. First we have all the +"raw healing power" talents that dont scale with gear, and honestly? once you have t 2 or greater, you can dump them and basically not notice. Then we have manaefficiency talents... And HoTW is very nearly as good. Then we have things like natures focus and subtlety which can be wholly ignored for raiding. All no subtelty means is that loose mobs go for the bear specced healer before they go for the priests, which is usually not a bad thing. And so on. The only talents in resto with major effects on raidhealing are swiftmend, natures swiftness, imp HT and reflection. In general, having the charm of nature equipped > being resto spec. (charm of nature and resto spec > just the charm, of course. But for some reason I dont see a lot of resto druids with it.)
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This wont work nearly as well come the patch, since they finally fixed scaling on the resto talents, but I am not really upset. Fully feral specced druids with not a single talentpoint in healing being basically as good healers as full resto druids is.. rather silly.

I'd just like to remind to everyone that innervate was at it's best in early Molten Core. Since then it's value has steadily declined as spirit has remained stagnant (or indeed gone down) while other mana sources have greatly improved. From the times of 15% spirit regen when casting and 100% outside 5 second rule (which at that time started when you began casting a spell) and major manas seldom used we have progressed to a situation where mana potions are drank like magewater in encounters that call for it, well geared healers walk with 100 MP/5 and downranking has further reduced the significance of mana recovery. At the time innervate was made trainable the skill was perhaps at it's weakest state ever and it really wasn't that big of a deal.

Innervate was and is a good stable skill but improved healing touch is generally seen as much more important healing talent. This will, of course, change in TBC where spirit seems to make a comeback.

I don't think innervate really was the problem. Problem is that it takes almost 2 feral druids to do the damage of 1 rogue. And those feral druids take over twice as much cleave etc. damage as the rogue.

Eeeh not really. Kaubel is good at moderation, but he's also a human being. If that comment were made in a quality post with emphasis on humor he wouldn't bat an eye. Might bust a gut though.

Anyways.. Thread renamed by request. Carry on.

Is anyone else sad that this thread (after looking at the new title) probably has more druids than their server/faction for raiding?

heh, speak for yourself, my guild has 11 active droods ^_^

We had 7 actives, then they got burnt out and recruited into other guilds. We now have myself and two alts <.<.

I wonder how viable an all-druid guild would be in BC? ;)

edit: I are speel gud

Ha. I used to raid Hordeside on Cenarion Circle. It was named Cenarion Circle, you'd figure it would attract druids! I once tried to count the total number of qualified raiding druids Hordeside and came up with something like 9 or 10.

I hope that the improvements to the Feral and Balance tree attract more druid players, but one problem with that is that the people who are drawn to druid by Feral and Balance are not necessarily the steadiest of healers. This isn't to say that Feral druids are bad healers but rather to say that I've seen a lot of 60 druids who came up all the way in Feral and either never learned to heal or never had a gift for it in the first place. You put them in a main healing sort of situation and they crack up.

My guild alliance has had 9 druids in Naxx raids, and we could probably get more. About half and half feral and resto, with the occasional balance oddballs.

So I'm curious, I saw this mentioned earlier in the thread but was it confirmed that druids are actually not getting as many itemization points as they should out of a feral item, on the assumption that they would have the HotW talent to boost stamina/strength? In other words, if you have a weapon with +FAP, +str, and +sta, does it not give as much str and sta as an weapon with simply those?

Two quest rewards from the same quest:

Staff of Beasts: +31 str, +30 agi, +45 sta, +298 FAP, 60.2 dps, ilevel 103
Honed Voidaxe: +31 str, +30 agi, +45 sta, 81.5dps, ilevel 103

My impression would be, 'no, the only penalty being exacted here is a trade-off of weapon DPS for FAP'. In other words, it's presumed that the base feral weapon is around 60.2 dps and that one needs to add 21.3 dps (from FAP) to make it equal the Voidaxe in damage.

A friend's guild on Staghelm is, at last count, on 4H and has 9 active raiding druids...and 1 priest, heh.

I'd love to see their raid setting; I assume it has alot of BR ME NOW! and innervates flying all over the place.

They also were not far behind progression; I think they were on Thaddius at a time when the leading guilds were on Loatheb.

It isn't that we get less for the ivalue, but blizzard is putting the points into something other than sta. So if you compare druid stamina (from sets) versus other classes we seem to come in last place. On the Gladiator stuff we come in about 40 stamina behind the next lowest (mage). I haven't compared stamina values on much gear, but we certainly seem headed toward lower stamina. Liar suggests this is because Blizzard is assuming we all have HotW.

Hm, it does seem weird if we have less stamina than mages in PVP gear, which is traditionally higher stamina. Okay, thanks for the clarification!

The druid "nuker" set has the same exact stam value. So clearly it is not that.

They appear to just think druids dont take nearly as much damage or something...

I'm not sure whether to be sad or proud at what has happened to my humble little thread...

::single tear rolls down cheek::

I posted this a long time ago in the thread when it was announced that raids would be 10- and 25- man only. In light of recent events, I propose that we call it Beef's Law.

This is similar to my guild - until recently we've had 3 80% priests. There are many raids where we'd have 3 priests ,6 druids and 6 paladins.

Good times.

I'll second this motion.

I'd propose Zyla's corollary - In any thread mentioning druids, feral spec will invariably be mentioned.

I guess noone cares anymore, but I found this while browsing the WoW forums:

List of all the new Druid Weapons

In my opinion, druid talents should have been much less of a defining factor, and druids should have received gear much stronger than other classes (instead of weaker gear and stronger talents.) Gear with literally +to every ability is much stronger on a shaman or paladin than a druid, because you're not able to utilize it all at the same time.

Or int/spirit/spell crit/spell hit should have converted into melee stats when shapeshifted.

Because there's simply no way to switch roles in combat and at any one time, so much of the class is going to waste.

I don't have a good solution, even giving us vanish to switch gear once in combat wouldn't really be ideal. I was really hoping we could have like one or two sets of gear, period, though, in the vein of genesis/warlord. Unfortunately, the item budget would leave gear like that entirely too inferior for tanking or healing, meaning it'd lose in the end.

One of the reasons i absolutely loved pvp on my druid was because i wove moonfires with rips, starfires with bashes, rooted and restealthed, pounced someone then healed the person he was attacking, etc. i had the ability to utilize everything using hybridized gear.

unfortunately, even that fell apart because other classes' gear scales way better than ours.


Edit: Obviously i'm not advocating the ability to heal as well as a holy priest and tank as well as a prot warrior and dps as well as a combat rogue just by shapeshifting. it should be possible to be virtually interchangable with them under the current system if you're geared and talented entirely for it, because frankly you give up everything else to do it. I don't like being godmode, or as someone else said, being able to switch classes easier than rerolling. i wish there was a way for us to be genuine hybrids but the item budget and the reality of raid gameplay doesn't allow it.

since this is the de facto druid thread of the moment and i've got some flag carrying to do on my alt this weekend - what do people think is the best wsg build at 60 with the new talents ? :)

I will tell you when I actually see which version of the talents goes live :-)

NS + HoTW is still going to be the best. In fact, it just got better with PI added to feral, and all the Feral talents from balance merged into Resto.

My guess it is because we have the potential to go into Bearform boosting our survivability significantly. Because we have the ability to "turtle-up" (or Bear-Up if you like) Blizzard moved some stamina points into other things.