Welcome to the jungle! Part 2
Welcome to the jungle! Part 2
WoW Blogs - Meowing in the Moonlight Druid Blog
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to a timewarp back to 2007, into the world of Burning Crusade!This is the second part of my introductory post, in which I explain why I love and have always loved druids, even through the bad times. The first part is here. (I downgraded to font size 10 as it seems to be the one everyone else uses. Unity before all!)
When Burning Crusade was introduced, the game underwent some heavy changes. There had been patches introducing new, more streamlined talent trees throughout Vanilla, but TBC brought with it 10 more levels and 10 more talent points to invest. The talent changes were brought out already before TBC, so there were plenty of people still raiding Naxxramas and Ahn'Qiraj when Tree of Life became available. I remember how I did some good old BWL in ToL and how much I disliked that cumbersome talent.
Now, you must be let in on the fact that ToL back then wasn't at all similar to what it is now. Firstly, there was no barkskin, no abolish poison or remove curse available in ToL. No offensive spells either. And to top it off, direct heals were forbidden and being in the form slowed your movement speed. Only HoTs and Swiftment could be used. You can see how most druids weren't really excited about reduced mana costs for Rejuvenation and Regrowth at the cost of nearly every other spell. I was one of them. On paper it looked decent, trading versatility for cheaper HoTs and an awesome aura. But in practice it was horrible. If you were on poison curing duty, you could not use ToL, because the constant changing of forms would devastate your mana. Same for decursing. And in BWL or AQ that was often.
Then came TBC and stubbornly sticking to resto spec I grinded 4 levels before I got bored and went on a hiatus. I only came back when I got an offer to join a very good guild as bear tank. I had a blast leveling a feral, but I forgot to check what bear tanking is all about. Sure, I got into the theorycrafting and mechanics of bear, but I didn't really find out how it is in practice. And let me tell you, it wasn't much fun at all.
To begin with, bear tanking was horribly monotonous. While warriors had some buttons to push, bears just parked their butts in a safe corner, spammed Maul and Lacerate and used Mangle as soon as it was out of cooldown. And two of those skills could be macroed to one button! In addition, there were only a handful of bosses a bear could tank, because of a now obsolete mechanic called 'Crushing Blow'. It meant that any boss hit not blocked, parried, missed or dodged was a Crushing Blow that dealt 150% damage. Warriors were virtually immune to Crushing Blows because of their skill 'Shield Block', which increased their block chance by 75% - and it was on all the time (completely unlike today's Shield Block). But us poor teddies were devastated, with no mechanics to counter Crushing Blows effectively. So, because we were only good tanking bosses that couldn't perform Crushing Blows, we were cats more than half the time. And that would've been just fine if it wasn't for two huge inconveniences.
Firstly, we had to gather two sets of gear for our two roles. Secondly, druid was viewed by the developers as a weird sort of "hybrid". In reality, druids were not hybrids: we could not succesfully perform two or more roles with only one spec and one set of gear. However, we were still punished as if we could. For example, if we were in tank gear, we could change to cat form and dps. But the dps wasn't "decent while still under pure classes" as a hybrid should've been, the dps was simply awful. If we were in cat gear, we could change to bear and maybe take a hit or two from a boss, but that was it - it wasn't usually enough to save the raid. At one point, a prot warrior in prot gear with two 1-handers would do more dps than a cat in bear gear. And even in pure cat gear we were way below other dps'ers. Even other hybrids, shamans, in their enhancement spec, could top dps-charts. While other classes would be doing 2k dps, cat would struggle to do 1,5. And seriously, how many guilds would've invested two sets of gear on feral druid when they could've just taken a rogue and a warrior? Not many besides mine.
Regardless, it wasn't all bad. There were times when feral druid was the best asset to a raid. For example, some of those bosses who couldn't hit with a Crushing Blow still had a huge base damage, but the thick and furry bear absorbing those huge hits made warriors look like toy tanks. Not to mention the avoidance. Warriors had a lot of item budget spent on block, which didn't completely negate damage, but ferals just stacked pure dodge. And then there were situations like the trash waves in Mount Hyjal, where a druid could efficiently swap from tanking to dps'ing, taunt a mob and run around kiting it, throw in a heal or two and interrupt a couple of casts here and there. It was the hybrid heaven and I played for those moments. Also, the druid dps-rotation was already pretty interesting back then. Not on the level of WoTLK -complexity, but interesting and more challenging than most others. The versatility, though lacking, kept me interested in ferals until WoTLK, but that'll be the topic of my next post.
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(TBC -warrior tank in action!)
On a sidenote, if you're interested in some Cataclysm previews, I find these beta videos by TotalBiscuit very entertaining.
Last Updated on Sunday, 08 August 2010 23:59 Written by Vepres Sunday, 08 August 2010 09:10