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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsShifting Perspectives: That special versatility
by David Bowers 
Oct 30th 2007 at 5:55PM
It's often been said that druids are the three-in-one class: we can mimic warriors, priests, rogues (and even mages), but can't fulfill their respective roles as well as they themselves can. While in recent times druids have been able to gear up and perform as well as their parent classes in many respects, we are far from "warriors with stealth" or "rogues that can heal" or "priests that can off-tank in a pinch."Our problem as druids is that we cannot but neglect the full breadth of our abilities when we must specialize in only one aspect of our class. Of course, any class works best in situations where most or all their abilities might be needed to succeed, sometimes even in the course of a single fight -- it's just that for druids these abilities include tanking, damage, and healing all together.
If you're playing with an experienced group, each player is likely specialized to one of these three roles, and his or her whole purpose is to minimize the chance that backup tanks, healers, and damage-dealers will be needed. That leaves druids trying to compete with warriors, rogues and priests (and mages), trying to do just as well at the same task, but with fewer abilities to call upon in the fight. Locked into these smaller roles, we must gear up and spend our talents in such a way that even if we were to shift out of our main role into another when the need arose, we wouldn't be able to do very well at it at all.
This brings me to the adventure at hand: Today we will go on an journey of the imagination together, exploring the potential future of druids, considering how this problem of specialization versus versatility might be approached. Indeed, as I gaze into my crystal-ball-shaped paper-weight, I see two possible futures: one, called "The Path of the Pandering Pedant," seeks nit-picky perfection in a class designed for breadth and scope, while the other, "the Way of the Multitudinous Master" brings the full manifest of all our abilities into harmonious use with one another.
The Path of the Pandering Pedant would be for druids to essentially become miniwarriors, minirogues, minipriests and minimages who can still shift forms, but only by finding lots of new gear and spending 50 gold on a new talent spec if they want to do so with any effectiveness. They would gain more and more abilities that are particularly suited towards "contributing something to the raid" in that very narrow and specialized sense, and continue to only use one fourth of these abilities, depending on which form they are specced and geared for at the moment.
This path might end up adding another button or two to press now and then, but ultimately will just lead us further into stagnation. I don't see any versatility here at all, except that druids in this situation would be able to re-gear and respec to mix it up a bit now and then. Ultimately all these specialized roles are so narrow for druids, I fear that none of them could be fully realized on their own.
The Way of the Multitudinous Master, on the other hand, would remain much more true to the druid's overall theme. Here, the Druid class would take a shift in direction so as to gain maximum possible benefit from multitasking, where performance of multiple roles in the group actually makes us perform our one assigned role better than just staying in one form all the time would.
To illustrate what I mean by this, consider a talent which druids used to have a long long time ago: "Swiftshifting: After leaving a shapeshift form, reduces the casting cost of the next shapeshift by 60% if used within 6 sec." Druids who got this talent were excited to be able to pop out of any form, shoot off a heal, and then shift back into form with minimal mana cost. It made their job as spot-healer in tricky situations much more exciting -- testing their skills to shift out, heal a friend, and get back into form before the 6 seconds are up. In patch 1.8, however, the famous Druid talent review that actually helped us out in many ways, this talent was replaced with Natural Shapeshifter, which just gives a boring 30% reduction in shapeshifting mana costs overall.
I'm sad that Swiftshifting is no longer with us -- it promoted synergy, using all the abilities you had available, and yet still helping you to do well at your main task. Likewise there are a few current druid talents that promote a somewhat diluted sense of synergy, such as Nurturing Instinct, which increases your healing spells by up to 50% of your strength (it ends up being not all that much, but still better than nothing, certainly), as well as Naturalist and Intensity, which buff both feral and restoration abilities together.
This is the right direction, but it lacks dynamic synergy that Swiftshifting had. What if your healing spells could put a short but powerful buff on you that increased your physical attack power or hasted your Starfire casting speed? What if Omen of Clarity (or something like it) were somehow less random, so that your physical attacks in feral forms could help you save mana when you saw the need to heal someone? The possibilities for combinations are endless.
Obviously, I can't imagine there are any druids out there who prefer to just be mini versions of an existing class, without using the full breadth of druid abilities. Back around the time just after patch 1.8, there were a lot of "I don't heal" cat druids, but eventually I think those players figured out they were really better off sticking with their rogues. The whole point of a druid is that we are able to do many things -- therefore I hope the future will give us more and more ways to maximize the effectiveness of our multitasking, letting druid talents and abilities specialize in different ways to use all our spells, and play all three roles together, rather than just pigeonholing us into using just a few abilities at the expense of all others.
Filed under: Druid, Analysis / Opinion, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
maarek Oct 31st 2007 12:27PM
The way I see it, right now with the proper gear a druid can easily spec to do quite well in 2/3 of the Trees. I have moonkin, but am technically a hybrid spec (Dreamstate Swiftkin Spec). I am able to MH Kara alongside a Holy Priest and stay even and sometimes even pass him in healing done(we make a great team). He has more "Oh Noes" abilities of course but that's the advantage of being a holy Priest. When I am not needed for healing I am in my blast gear in moonkin form and I hold the #2/#3 spot on Damage typically. I don't set the world on fire for DPS but I do well enough. I suppose if I had decent feral gear I could hold up there as well...but not having any points in the feral tree makes me doubt it.
I think the trick for Hybrids....especially Druids... is to realize that the spec can get you in the door but it's your gear that determines your best role.
Minnow Oct 31st 2007 1:44PM
lol'ed at that pic...
Stig Oct 31st 2007 2:28PM
I think a lot of you are missing the point. Its not that druids can't MT, or main heal, or even DPS effectively. The problem is we have to pick ONE and do ONE, perhaps with the exception of boomkin/healing. There is no WAY to be an effective cat DPSer and healer in the same fight. You have to give up ALL your healing gear to be able to do any kind of significant DPS (especially in a place like Kara where you can't bleed anything) and therefor gimp yourself completely at healing. So sure, I can pop out of cat and throw a heal on myself, innervate the priest, then pop back in to cat, but thats not really utility. A rogue can just as easily back up and bandage (though admittedly they can't innervate anyone :P) Druids were ORIGINALLY intended to be a jack of all trades. Problem is the game has pushed us to become the master of one. Whats the real point in being a hybrid class if you don't play as a hybrid. The most hybrid I get is while soloing because that forces you to be tank/dps/healer for yourself.
Druids should be able to either chose a spec and excel at one thing, or be useful doing 2 or 3 things in a group. But once we head to that route, we become less than mediocre at most things which I find extremely disappointing.
jefeweiss Oct 31st 2007 2:47PM
I like the idea of a druid having versatility. I think that there are some problems now with gearing up to play more then one role, particularly in the arena, where there is a big limitation in switching gear. In my experience, gear is a bigger factor in performance then spec.
One solution that I have tended to favor would be to move our additional talented forms to lower in their trees. So moonkin would be the 21 point talent in balance, and tree form would be the 21 point talent in restoration. I don't think that the forms give big enough bonuses to be 31 or 41 point talents, and having them lower would allow a druid to spec both moonkin and tree. The synergy between the two mana based druid forms would make the druid more viable as a healer and ranged DPS class.
The most obvious issue with feral forms is the lack of gear crossover with the other two roles. This isn't a big issue in BGs or PVE, where if you can get out of combat you can switch gear, but it plays a big role in the arenas. I'd say 90% of the druids I have seen on higher ranked arena teams are 8/11/42 resto.
David Bowers Oct 31st 2007 3:51PM
Many of you get my point completely here, but some are finding it unclear, so I'll do my best to clarify a bit. We are all very used to hearing that "druids aren't as good as warriors/rogues/mages/priests in role X," and now thankfully we can rightfully respond that such people have no idea what they're talking about. Druids can do *very well* in any role, provided we meet the talent and gear conditions.
The problem is that, within that role, we have a very limited set of abilities to use. All our tanking abilities fit on one little bar (thus my "miniwarrior" statement -- not less effective, just less versatile within that role). The same is true of our spell damage, melee damage, and healing abilities. Generally, while you are using one set of abilities, say bear abilities for example, you are completely locked out from using abilities of any other sort. This would be fine if our work actually required us to switch around and use our different forms quite often, but as things go, we tend to need to focus down as much as possible, so that we end up hardly ever shifting out of our one chosen role -- and even when we do, it's only between battles, after changing gear.
So, although druids have some of the widest variety of abilities of any class in the game, these abilities do not work together with synergy hardly at all. Without synergy of all our abilities, there's no room for the finesse other classes use, when bringing their full set of skills to their one task. A smart hunter for example, has a number of traps and stings and shots and pet abilities and cooldowns for every situation. In any instance, he's likely to use all of them several times to help his group, carefully timing everything to be most effective, while the druid tank he's working with is just spamming mangle, maul and lacerate (maybe some demoralizing roars and faerie fire, as well as growl or frenzied regeneration if things get out of control). The druid tank does 0 healing, 0 cat form abilities, 0 offensive spellcasting. Those are 3/4ths of his class's abilities just sitting greyed out on his action bars.
Certainly some of you are just more than happy to be excelling in your chosen role, and that's wonderful. I'm just saying that as a class, I think we ought to be using all of our abilities no matter which role we've chosen.
For example -- here's something I'd like to try in patch 2.3 (though I'm not sure how well it would work in real high-end situations): I'll be tanking in bear form, I see my healers running low on mana and the group is close to dying, so I hit barkskin. This automatically sends me into caster form with barkskin up, mitigating incoming damage (hopefully enough), while I use tranquility to heal everyone back up. Tranquility finishes with me having a moment left in barkskin to innervate the main healer before I switch back to bear form and resume tanking. That should also work for offensive spells like hurricane (which is sadly weak at the moment), ideally allowing me to moonfire several targets before going back to bear form. It ought not to be a relatively safe procedure that any good druid could pull off without sending the group into a panic. Alternately, if we need a lot of dps on a boss during the final seconds of the fight (as in the Headless Horseman battle), I think Barkskin ought to be strong enough to let me shift out of bear, toss a HoT on myself, and tank in cat form for the (short) remainder of the fight in order to do as much damage as possible (similar to warriors using the Recklessness ability).
That would be synergy, and talents should promote that sort of thing, raising my spell damage and healing coming out of feral form, or boosting forms after healing or doing spell damage. This sort of creative use of the complete spectrum of druid abilities should be expected of all competent -- not unthinkably risky. Nothing should force you to shift around, of course, but you should feel that shifting around makes you more useful than just staying in one shape, doing just one thing.
Stig Oct 31st 2007 7:45PM
I really like that barkskin idea. Perhaps they could make thick hide apply to barkskin as well as armor contribution: also increases damage reduction of barkskin ability by 10%/20%/30%. That increases damage reduction to 50% while its active, making the above scenario more likely to be possible AND able to succeed, though not something you'd be likely to do on an encounter like the Prince. It would probably have to be changed to remove barkskin on shift so you couldn't have 12 seconds of barkskin + bear tanking. (It may already remove on form, but I haven't tested it...)