Fair enough. I think the average player who wants to main those specs are going to be in for a rough time though. The community has made that quite clear. Many on these forums have flat out stated that they will not be inviting feral druids/ret paladins/shadow priests/enh and ele shamans to their groups and raids.
My original desire was to play a shadow priest, but decided to go warlock instead just to be safe. Because I want to raid and don’t want to take the chance of being rejected from groups. Wanted to be a mindbending master of darkness, had to settle for just being a master of darkness, lols.
There are certainly classes that a shadow priest will still be able to give a hard time in pvp, much like the warrior and frost mage. I played one through the entirety of vanilla and didn’t have much issue killing people with just the dungeon set, depending on how they played.
Plus there’s always juking an interrupt and then mind controlling them off the UBRS chain 
Edit: That said I plan on playing all 3 clothies, at some point, so I’ll have alternatives available.
I plan on having 1 of my 3 mains be a feral off tank. I think they are better then people give credit for and definatly a good 3rd option. Pve or pvp realm? Raid times/days?
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The community is wrong. I appreciate your honesty and don’t disagree about what average players will experience. We’ve learned a lot about warcraft since vanilla, and it is time druids claw back. It is up to us to prove it in game.
If I was any kind of strong leader, or person for that matter, I’d be the kind that would invite those lost and forgotten specs into my raid or group. Sadly I cannot run my way out of a paper bag and thus I don’t think I’ll be able to start anything like that. Nevertheless I sympathize with the plight of those who identify with being a blade-swinging crusader of justice, or a ferocious cat, and I think a major Vanilla downside was the lack of viability for those specs. I genuinely think Retail is better in that one regard.
I agree - and if you (or anyone else) are interested: [A] <Unity> | Pagle | Semi-Hardcore | Tu/Th +Sun 8-10PM EST
Are you playing Alliance by chance?
I understand the fear of missing a raid tier. There have been tiers when resto druids were left on the bench. I’m invested in my druid and don’t want to re-roll. It makes my playtime vulnerable to balancing whims.
That said, should a toon be great in BWL? MC? AQ40? Naxx? Some classes do better in early tiers and worse later. Which can do you choose?
Choose being valuable to your raid; sometimes it doesn’t show directly in the meters.
I’m sure if you conformed to the whims of the community and forced yourself to be a healer you’d be fine in all the raid tiers as a druid. And imo, that sucks. If someone doesn’t want to heal, if someone wants to play a druid as the other two specs, they’re laughed at and rejected when it comes to Vanilla. In Retail that is not a thing; you can play Guardian, Balance or Feral to your hearts content and make it to the top.
Every class and spec should be viable all the way from level one to their first Naxx clear. I know that is not a thing, but I consider that a major flaw when it comes to Classic. Classic has other advantages going for it, but that is not one in my eyes.
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I am going Alliance-Whitemane and am going Priest as well as Druid for the entirety of Classic. Let me know!
I was looking around for guilds, and I plan to roll feral druid/ret paladin for mains. For quite some time, the guilds simply said “we already have one” or “lol you’ll heal.”
Ultimately, I don’t really care much about raiding… so I joined a sweet PvP guild.
I’d look into the overall mindset of your fellow guildies. Are they chasing some away?
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No, because most people are actually waiting until we get in the game and play before joining anything.
You should join me, as Warlock or Shadow Priest, or both, we’ll take ya. MC/Ony on week 5.
Could I convince you to roll Pagle 
I wish I could shrug off the whole idea of needing to raid, but it’s a sad reality of Vanilla that if you’re not raiding, you’re getting eaten alive by those who do. Unless you’re one of those rare few who reach Rank 14, but let’s be real that’s going to be a very small minority.
I appreciate the offer but I’m already settled on rolling on BB, and already established with another raiding guild. If you came about a few months earlier though I would have hopped on board. Because I really did want to play a shadow priest that could look forward to T3 and an Atiesh one day. But these forums kind of killed that desire by threatening me to heal or else.
I’ve made a Druid on Pagle and plan to go Feral but don’t know if I’d have time to raid tbh. I didn’t plan the Druid to be my main, the Mage will be, the Druid is mostly for gathering. I’d have to see how it goes to decide if I have the time and want to raid on the Druid.
Damn lol the min-max try-hards have been screaming so loud that people wont even touch those classes.
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Mages, actually…
we’ve got like 10 warriors 8 rogues, 6 warlocks… and only 4 mages.
Shadow Priest is my jam, only thing that was better for me was Disc on TBC. Going to be playing shadow for a long time to come now that classic is coming.
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I don’t know that many other guilds are actively looking for them, or that many hybrids would be expecting them to. It’ll come later - you’re just too far ahead of the curve 
I’m planning to play hybrid talent tree build for off tanking druid on Bloodsail Buccaneers. But as my guildmaster stated, although I may play whatever I want, but if the numbers don’t add up and performance suffers greatly, I’ll be stuck healing.
Our assumption is that most data available from private servers does not account for a lot of things that will hurt druid’s ability to tank even further.
I’m saying, I’ll challenge myself to tank in raid, and we shall see what happens.