Not to be rude, but I think you like many in the player base have unrealistic expectations for this SOD development team. They’re fully incapable of putting the level of detail into the newly minted phases, not because of their lack of desire, but because of their lack of resources.
Blizzard really did some classes dirty it’s almost like they really don’t play the game or they just main Shamans lol actual joke if you think about it
This guy speaks FACTS
Not sure what you’re looking for in a classic setting. Already balance uses 5 spells in their rotation which is more than many of the other classes. What constitutes “fun”?
Those spells would make you OP in pvp. Gotta’ factor that in.
Not necessarily. Adding star surge to the base phase 1 didn’t make balance OP. We just ignored the spell haha. It’s all about tuning
idk hurricane does “alright” if you use it on a trash pack in gnomer right now. Not more than double-dotting everything but it’s not like I’m last on the trash dps if I use hurricane right now.
hurricane doesn’t have a target cap either afaik. It’ll be worth casting and that makes me happy. Being able to apply the attack/casting slow on lots of mobs without the cooldown too is just nice. It might not be perfect but I’m happy about it.
But then again it might just be a datamine spell that doesn’t make it in like in phase 2 haha
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Honestly the problem is more how cramped the rotation is, it has a strict 12s rotation that flows poorly especially with Nature’s Grace.
12s is 8 GCDs and 4 of them are taken by DoTs and Starsurge, and another 2 by spending the Starfire buff from Starsurge. (Technically 3 if you consider Starfire potentially not being reduced by Nature’s Grace)
It makes the rotation incredibly, clunky, inflexible, and also severely devalues a lot of effects since they require Wrath which is no longer able to be cast often.
The datamined P3 rune helps this a little, but it’s still just fixing inherent issues with the class rather than actually providing something.
All of the rotation is still just “hard cast x” as well, we don’t have any meaningful procs or things we control.
We just press the buttons in order and hope the damage is good.
The only engaging part of our rotation is afking to reduce threat.
There are plenty of ways they could make it more engaging without even adding more abilities, like actually making Eclipse something we can engage with, providing procs or resets, granting buffs that change our priority for a period of time, etc.
Heck, imagine if by rune choice you could specialise towards either a Solar or Lunar druid each with unique. Instead we get “your mana issues are slightly less horrible”, “your damage isn’t entirely terrible”, and now “your rotation that we screwed up is slightly more manageable”, with P4 no doubt bringing “your threat generation is no longer as bad”
But sadly for anything to happen they need to fix our issues baseline instead of through the only tools they give us for gameplay modification.
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What’s actually insane to me, is that the devs have 0 clue about how much aggro hurricane generates, due to the built in atk speed reduction debuff. So they let us cast this with no CD and double the damage and threat, but we can’t even use it without barkskin being up, because it’s still a channeled spell.
Comparing our runes to most of the other classes, we got dumpstered in most areas. Cool, I guess I can spam wrath more now, neato? Meanwhile, warlocks, mages and SP get gigachad cool runes that help them a lot. We wont even get into the insane shaman runes.
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These developers are completely out of their depth. Like most things Blizzard does, its an epic failure now. Sorry I mean Activision… Or is it Microsoft? 6 months later and full of incompetency. These “runes” are a prime example of how out of touch they are. Not even understanding the class itself and making runes that contradict one another, even shadow priests are dealing with that and others. Barkskin, Hurricane… like W…T…ACTUAL…F… are these “developers” doing with their time.
Why dont you make a suggestion instead of just complaining. Come up with something yourself. Then we can judge your ideas.
You gonna pay me a California senior developers salary to consult to do so? Nothing 99% of the opinion on this forum do anything. I’m not gonna run a fools errand. The consensus is that these runes are dogwater. They can figure out what to do from there.
Balance Druid has everything it needs. The hurricane change is cool. You have nothing to suggest. Comes off as entitled whining.
I’m a paying customer, I’m entitled to my opinion. It’s not my JOB to tell them what they should be doing, but I am letting the chef know the dish isn’t good, along with half the people who tried the special tonight and he now knows why. It’s his JOB to go back to the kitchen and craft something new up.
Druids are everywhere in game and will continue to be. Know why? Because they are strong and fun. You may not like Druids, but they are very capable and no less fun than any other class.
Of course youre entitled to your opinion.
Fun fact: druid aoe farming was a thing in regular classic, using hurricane. twice the damage should help with that immensely. Its weird druids are getting that buffed at all considering Aggrend himself said classic is not about large AoE pulls and groups need to learn to single target stuff more. Of course they buff druids aoe more anyways, and of course, druids complain they want more.
I made plenty of suggestions above, to be fair.
Let me explain it like this, or try to, and you can feel free to take it as you like: there are plenty of classes that had really complete kits going into SoD. High damage, lots of utility, good buffs, personal perks, fun cooldowns. Mages, Rogues, and others. Druid came into SoD at a fairly substantial disadvantage because all three specs in Vanilla were generally considered to be pretty weak, and not just in terms of damage. Aside from two strong progression cooldowns, they didn’t really do anything special. Resto had a pretty complete kit and suffered mostly due to bad talent support and some system and mechanics things, but balance and feral felt anemic, lacking both depth and uniqueness in addition to the above problems.
Frankly, balance specifically had very poor talent support. Most of the runes are replacements for good talents or supplementary things that make the existing talents shine. That’s nice. But it feels boring. While other classes and specs are getting a variety of fun runes they can mix and match to experiment with new builds and even entirely new roles and playstyles. every balance rune can essentially be boiled down to “you scale now,” “you don’t run out of mana now,” etc.
The runes are also extremely contained to a single spec or playstyle. My low level mage can mix and match and experiment with these runes. Frost healer may not be great, but spellfrost bolt makes it possible. Balance Druids get nothing from skullbash, nothing from mangle, nothing from nourish, etc. The closest we got is Wild Growth, but you could put Wild Growth on a totem and it would be just as dumb because the spell is overtuned, lol.
Again, it would be great if we got at least one new active ability that is just fun and not meant exclusively to make us scale harder.
Even the buffed Hurricane will not make Druid AoE super amazing or anything. Hurricane having a cooldown was almost entirely there to hamstring Druids, the spell existing at all was mostly a concession.
Hehe, what? Press X to doubt. I’ll happily be proven wrong but this just sounds fake to me.
it wasnt mage tier but you could pull 5-6 lvl 50+ mobs at a time and kill them all in a few seconds using hurricane and barkskin.
Even the buffed Hurricane will not make Druid AoE super amazing or anything. Hurricane having a cooldown was almost entirely there to hamstring Druids, the spell existing at all was mostly a concession.
The cooldown is only 1min. so you use it then you drink then it is ready again by the time you are finished pulled the next wave. Druids have one of the craziest kits in classic, the only thing keeping them somewhat fair was the hybrid tax. They are an S tier class in SoD right now. That doesnt stop druids from either complaining they have no choices for each role for runes, or for complaining they dont like having to pick between the different feral runes. I swear druids complain more than warriors do, and warriors are the designated red headed stepchild class because they were OP in one area of the game a few years ago.
Mages were a super class in Era. They are powerful with many talent set ups in SoD.
The SoD team have done a pretty good job patching up Druids in SoD. Balance is strong af. They are one of the ‘chosen’ specs, imo. Some STV groups are 4 Moonkins and one Priest.
The devs gave Feral Wildstrikes, ensuring a raid invite at all times.
Restore has gotten stronger and stronger with each phase. The AoE healing is going to be crazy in P3.
I think Druids are in a great spot. There is always someone who will complain but to take a bitter stand and claim that the Devs are out of their depth or that Druids in SoD are an epic failure is, to me, a bridge too far.