Bezayne

Well if we come back to warriors being better dps and better tanks in every circumstance over ferals, we are back to square one - ferals can stay home. Plus the people who play feral druids happen to be on general just as competitive as your average warrior, aka why spend so much time, eneryg and love just to be a clear second rate in everything? 5% crit aura is not making up for the plethora of tools a warrior has in every of his areas above a druid.

This is getting old - our itemization sucks, we are getting nerfed back to the stone-age and on top of that get told providing one buff to the physical dps people around us should be reason enough to have us around. Oh joy.

 

Kink

I would hardly call a fight you agree to have unique mechanics as a tipping point when we still know so little about what is beyond Gruul =).

Also, does no one else ever use low rank hurricanes to slow bosses attack speed? I think I am still living in my EQ raiding days maybe where slow was king, but it is quite easy to keep a hurricane cycle going with a few druids and the extra 20% slow is quite tasty when you take into account shield block and its cooldown/charges. Throw in a TF and you have a very nice slow indeed. I gues sgetting a guild to implement this is pretty tough though, my guild only ever allowed it on Ebonroc so that he attacked slower and didnt heal himself so much =).

All in all, even doing lower dps I think that druids will be wanted for their other abilities. Yes yes we want to do DPS and tank, but the fact is with the right gear we can also heal when needed, tranquilitiy is superb, innervate is sexy, I just do not see it being an issue.

All we are doing in all these druid threads is arguing the same points and counterpoints. It seems a bit moot and better left to people with new stuff to say.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Jayde

Ferals can still heal.

No really, they can.

Please don't give me default line about how "we can't do everything at once"--it doesn't matter. The point is, ferals are almost critical to a 10-man raid right now, and very useful in a 25-man raid simply due to their flexibility alone.

Honestly, you don't HAVE to beat anyone (even though Druids currently do in many cases) at anything to still be nearly required additions to any flexible group. I simply would not go into Karazhan without a Feral Druid if I didn't have the choice. There is just nothing that beats a single class that can tank at prot-spec Warrior level one fight, DPS the next fight, and swap on a full healing set and heal the last. Even being able to pop out of bearform after off-tanking and use a few heals+Innervate a Priest is amazingly useful.

When you talk about a "plethora of tools", I think you have mistakenly attributed it to the wrong class. Feral Druids are considerably more flexible and have considerably more utility and tools than DPS spec Warriors can ever hope to have.

Right now, Druids beat DPS Warriors at tanking very easily, while doing solid melee DPS and bringing extremely good raid buffs with LotP+Imp. LotP even while DPSing. They have the ability to off-heal when needed, can Innervate healers at critical moments, and generally provide the mid-fight context swapping (a Druid in catform gear owns a DPS Warrior in DPS gear at tanking, seriously...) that other classes are simply not capable of. I don't see anything wrong.

A Druid need not feel compelled to make other classes useless just to justify their existance. Druids are already good, useful in groups, and welcomed in any raid with a raid leader that has a clue.

 

◊ Kaubel

It's not even a good whine either. Rather it's pretty damn pitiful with no attempt to even hide that it's a whine.

You get a warning this time because I hate these threads anyway, and my opinion is they do nothing but encourage people to piss, moan, and argue.

 

Juno

This is exactly what I said in another thread. I love druids who truly use their entire plethora of abilities. In Karazhan, a feral druid is a fresh breeze. Excellent OT, when whatever is dead on the boss (imp for illhoof, horse on attuman) they can throw in a heal or Innervate or combat ress someone. When needed they can dps very nicely in cat and and still use innervate/combat ress, excellent on for example Aran or Curator, our feral druid hits #1 on dps every single time when our top rogue ain't there on Aran.
He offtanks Imp with mainly swipe spam to get threat on Illhoof so when I get chained, he can take over during it. If we lack healers he can switch to healing gear on trash and be one of the top healers, and also was on Prince. They don't need to be better than every class they can mimic (some people say competitive, but they want to be better), they're still an awesome addition to the group, valuable in almost every area. This is more true for feral druids though, our balance druid hasn't been on too many raids yet but I'm doubting his ability to do more dps than the feral. Resto druid (which we have none of )is more like a prot warrior, locked into one role, but that's mostly how 'true' PvE specs are for every class.

 

Kink

This is why I have now switched back to my druid. A rogue is exceptionally 1 dimensional. I would rather do worse DPS and yet still bring something valuable to my raid group to justify my raid spot, and even post nerf druids do this.

There is quite a good portion of DPS leather avilable, so I think cat dps will scale. Bear tanking post nerf is good enough for everything up to and including magtheridons adds. So it seems to me bears will still have their place. Throw in the fact I can tank 5mans as well as OTing in raids, why be unhappy?

Now, druids who were MTing for their guild and now have to regress progression wise and regear up tanks, yeah, its a shitty situation, but one you will easily overcome in a few weeks. There is very little prot warriors cannot tank with blues that a druid could tank right now. However I really empathise with people in this situation as it punished a lot of folks.

Once you get over the fact that we are being nerfed and look at the facts of what we can still do, it looks much brighter. Stop looking just at the negative numbers and start looking at what is still possible. Can a druid MT? yes, but not as well as a prot warrior, so unless yer prot warrior is sick, you won't be the MT, sorry. Can a druid OT? for sure yes. We had druids offtanking Kara with 12k armour and 11k hp and NOT crit immune. Those are the stats of a VERY poor feral tank truth be told, even post nerf no druid should have those stats.

And yes, we can even do the dirty deed. Healing. Sure we will suck at it, but on some fights a few good healers and one sucky healer is all that you need. We are hybrids, we perform multiple roles, post and prenerf this is still true, its just that prenerf our threat went through the roof and Blizzard nerfed it*. The armour+hp nerfs could easily be offset by what items we have yet to see so why argue them.

I really do not see any cause for discussion anymore. Yes, we dps worse than rogues. Yes we heal worse than priests and pallies, yes we tank worse than a prot spec warrior. Yes, we can still do all those jobs well enough and take up just 1 raid slot. What other class can do those 3 jobs in the same raid? if thats the 3 things you wish to do, then stay as your druid. If you want to do one of those 3 things better, just reroll to a more "pure" class. I think too many people are content still for there to be any serious buff changing the above facts.


*Our threat took a big nerf. But blizzard have stated that if the nerf makes bear tanks to not be viable, they will rectify the problem. Maybe someone else can post a link to that blue reply as forums/bluecardplace is blocked at my work.

*edit*
As far as the so called tipping point goes, we do not yet know what will drop. If leather epics in the true 25man dungeons (i.e. not gruul and mag) will bring us back up to our former glory, could a single person complain? Yes, we have the same stats we used to have, but those stats were quite insane. So now ALL it means is we get those stats when we were supposed to have it, i.e. just as fury warriors start to exceed our ability. I really do not see a problem with this.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Runnybabbit

I would be too. On the other hand, I also like to think I would've identified that problem six weeks before the expansion went live as opposed to six weeks after. Several people on these boards recognized what was happening with early itemization and freakish bear stats while TBC was still in beta. I don't know what Blizzard's excuse is.

The only thing that's even more bewildering than Blizzard's apparent oversight is the proposed remedy. If the balance of one particular class gets out of whack because you fucked up the relative power of a handful of quest reward items versus the tiered set items, do you (a) fix a couple dozen or so items or (b) make sweeping changes to the class mechanics?

Speaking just for myself here, I'd rather play a balanced class with balanced itemization than an underpowered class with offsetting overpowered itemization.

 

Yaha

Does the Hurricane slow stack with other slows? (Thunderclap, etc.) I was under the impression they didn't, but I haven't tested it.

 

• Daboran

I honestly can't remember this - I feel sure my MT said it didn't stack with TF. If it doesnt it should do really, it's a seriously underused spell and a buff to it's utility would be nice.

 

Kink

We had a TF tank in our BWL days, and we used hurricane for ebonroc. I really can't say we did any extensive tests but everyone said it "felt" like it died much much faster (slower attack speed = much less healing when he cursed the tank).

Of course maybe the tanks where just faster at taunting.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.