Welcome to the jungle!
Welcome to the jungle!
WoW Blogs - Meowing in the Moonlight Druid Blog
I'll give you a short introduction for starters: I am Vepres, the druid. I have played World of Warcraft since Vanilla's open beta. I was a warrior at first, but quickly found myself in love with the druid. Kind of like the exact opposite of our Little Ball of Rage there. That brings me to approximately 5 years of solid druid experience. At first I was a restoration druid, but in times of Burning Crusade I became a feral and the furry thing just enchanted me and never let go. So there's my inspiration!
I've decided to write posts in three different categories: 'A Look Into The Past', 'Thoughts About The Future' and 'The Present'. In my first posts I'd like to present to you the question "Why do you play a druid?" and my answer to that. So consider this 'A Look Into The Past' a little historic on why I loved and still love druids.
In Vanilla, druids were considered healers by players and developers alike. And even as such, they were very rare. Not to mention the ferals and moonkins who, besides the few immensely skilled players, were quite extinct. There were priests around by the bunch, some shamans here and there and this odd druid who got all the druid loot on the first Molten Core -run. That was me.
All I heard was that druid is an inferior healer and only good for innervating priests or shamans (or paladins, but horde didn't have those back then), and I set to prove otherwise. I had noticed while leveling how versatile and fun class a druid is. Sure, we lacked quick heals, shields and awesome totems, and even though our HoTs healed a lot they were considered just an emergency backup for direct healing, their effect being too slow and spread too thin. But we had innervate, a good mana efficiency and a very solid albeit slow direct heal. I saw potential in those, as long as they were in skilled hands. Also, pretty soon after raiding started, when the developers decided to disable all other resurrecting during combat, our Rebirth became invaluable.
Druids became all about foreseeing what would happen next: a slow heal needed to be cast way before the target got hit, an innervate required knowledge of who would go out of mana next and if he was worth the cooldown, and combat resurrection wasn't to be wasted either. A good resto druid was an oracle of sorts, always a step ahead of the action, calculating the swings and casts in their head.
Eventually, after upranking gear, downranking spells and learning the ropes, I proved to myself that a druid is just as capable a healer as any priest. I prided myself on the fact that even though I didn't have any other method of resurrection besides my Rebirth, I healed so well that it was all I needed. On a worse note, we sucked in PvP. Opponents rarely bothered to kill resto druids, as we never managed to land heals on our team mates before they were dead. That never caused my interest to fade, but soon Burning Crusade hit the shelves and the class was redesigned. The moment I first stood in Tree Form I knew I didn't like it - it was all about HoTs and no more about the prediction-game. However, I'll leave that part of the story for my next post.
Oh, someone go gnaw on some gnome warriors for me, they are obviously dissing us. This Rather Large Ball of Fur(y) doesn't approve!
Written by Vepres Thursday, 05 August 2010 09:42