I’ve been reading on the forums lately that Bear Druids seem to lack an identity these days.
I have a wild concept that might help change that. It’ll increase survivability, damage, and give Bear tanks a unique playstyle.
I think we should take the Druid back to the good old days of being a true hybrid class. One that can perform all of the roles even in a single spec. We should get back into the shape shifting aspect of the class. Here’s my idea.
If you spend 10 seconds in bear form, you then get 10 seconds of bear form stats (health, armour and damage reductions) outside of bear form. You spend 10 seconds in bear form, then switch to cat form with the same amount of health and armour for 10 seconds. After that 10 seconds is up you lose the health and armour benefits and you then swap back to bear form. This would allow for an on the fly shape shifting playstyle.
This would allow you to either dps in cat or boomkin forms or pop into caster form to heal without immediately becoming squishy and dying. You would simply keep all of the benefits of bear form for 10 seconds. Including your Iron Fur stacks. This wouldn’t be a weird 3-5 minute talent. It would just be the passive core gameplay for bear.
Allowing us to get back to the shape shifting roots of the class. The jack of all trades. An actual hybrid class that performs all of the roles during combat.
It would promote shifting into the dps forms to deal extra damage since you’re not losing out on your defense. (outside of not being able to use Iron Fur/Survival Instincts/Berserk outside of bear form.) You would always have to return to bear form after that 10 second window was up. (Simply to restart the counter. You wouldn’t HAVE to return to bear form if you felt you didn’t want to.)
You could also switch into caster form to throw heals on yourself. This would allow Druids to use their heals without having to sacrifice their defensive stats. This would drastically increase their survivability if they were actually able to use their own healing spells.
Every 10 seconds you would be swapping to a new form to do something different and ultimately returning to bear form every time the buff expires. You would retain your Iron Fur stacks for their remaining duration, but not be able to re-apply it while in your other forms. Abilities like Survival Instincts and Berserk would force you back into Bear form. (You would keep the buffs outside of bear form. Iron Fur would still keep the stacks of armour until the Iron Fur buff dropped off. To re-apply you would have to swap back to bear.)
You would start out in bear form. Build up 100 rage and after 10 seconds dump it all into Iron Fur. Then you could swap to either cat or Boomkin form to start dpsing. After 10 seconds, the health and armour would drop off and you would swap back to Bear. If you needed more survivability you could instead swap to caster form to heal yourself and throw out a few offensive spells. Then back into bear form.
It would be a constant game of swapping between forms depending on what you needed in the moment and it would encourage players to play more offensively since they’ll keep their passive defenses for a short while.
If you wanted to take this one step further, (And possibly be too OP) you could have separate timers for each of your forms.
After 10 seconds of being in bear form, you would get 3 separate buffs that would only count down once you shifted into their respective forms.
So you’d essentially keep your passive bear form defenses for 30 seconds across 3 different forms.
Shifting into cat form would only start the buff timer on the cat form buff and would not affect the caster or boomkin buffs.
So theoretically you could do 10 seconds in bear, 10 seconds in cat, 10 seconds in caster to heal up/cast a few offensive spells and then finish with 10 seconds in boomkin form and then back into bear. Rinse and repeat in whatever order you feel necessary.
(You could even have a separate 5 second timer that starts after your forms buff wears off. If you haven’t shifted into another form 5 seconds after your current forms buff wears off, then you lose all the buffs. This would prevent you from saving them.)
Thoughts? Opinions? Concerns?
Is this silly? Is this too OP? Is it too convoluted and unnecessary?
Would this help with survivability being able to swap out to heal while keeping your health and armour values? Or be able to dps without feeling like you need to kite or you’d get 1 shot?
Would you find this to be a fun game play style? Constantly on the move swapping between forms every few seconds? Or would you rather just stick to bear form all the time? (Pretty sure most bears swap around as it is. This would just give some added protection when you do.)
