I’ve never played Druid before and as strong as I thought they were, they feel very underwhelming
I’m currently 26 and trying to tank dungeons, seems really difficult to hold aggro.
I’ve got Swipe and demoralizing shout. Aside from a very short range Taunt, that’s it??
Leveling feral, again, pretty much 2 abilities? That’s it? Claw to build combo points, Rake for a mini “bleed” and Rip to spend combo points which is another DoT? Shred feels like a weak backstab, which of course you only have 1 chance of doing on the opener.
I really haven’t explored Ranged DPS, but maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be leveling despite what the guides say? If that’s the case, I could have gone my 2nd fav class (Mage).
The dungeon don’t really offer any good loot for Druids as well.
What am I missing? How did people enjoy playing this class?
Druid is one of the strongest leveling classes and you shouldn’t really be struggling while tanking, dpsing, or even healing dungeons. Feral is the recommended leveling spec because there is very little down time. You regen mana while in cat or bear form so you can kill something, swap out of form and heal up, and then continue on.
As the only 51 horde feral druid tank on the server I was on in Vanilla (Cenarian Circle) here are some things to keep in mind when playing feral tanks.
Feral in retail is a completely different animal from what is in retail.
Aggro is generated by 4-5 abilities. Those abilities are faerie fire, maul, swipe, taunt, and demoralizing shout.
When tanking, your pull is faerie fire.
When pulling packs, CC is your friend. Use your roots (they aren’t as good as other forms, but it is better than nothing)
When gearing, you will almost never get purple gear you could use to make tanking better. If you make it to end game, you WILL be in greens and blues. (Itemization in Vanilla did not have gear made for bear tanks.) Your goto set in the beginning is Wildheart (Feralheart is better) and your raid set will be AQ40.
The stat priority that you will read about is total BS. Keep these things in mind (mind you, this is for Vanilla and TBC ONLY) STR=AP; AGL=Crit; INT=mana pool; WIS=mana regen. Now, when building out your gear, since MAUL generates threat, you want it to hit HARD. AGL will NOT get you a hard hit with low STR. In Vanilla, STR allowed you to hit harder. Sure, crits are nice, but if you have high crit and low STR, it will hit like a wet noodle, you gain nothing. Trust me on this, in Vanilla, you wanted to have more STR than AGL. Those that tell you otherwise do not know, nor remember tanking (99.9% of Druids in vanilla did NOT tank at all till after 1.09 patch… even then bear tanks were rare as hen’s teeth because gearing them was next to impossible).
For the detractors that will try to derail this by saying AGL>STR, here is an example:
Since AP was not heavily influenced by AGL in those days, your base damage output looked something like this:
100 (normal hit) + 100 + 100 + 200 (crit) +100 + 200 (crit) = 700 total dps (no STR)
120 (normal hit) + 120 + 120 + 120 + 120 + 240 (crit) = 720 total dps (with STR)
Now looking at these numbers doesn’t look like much, but, as a tank, that extra 20 damage will generate the extra threat, and the crit generates that much more. Granted, it will not be doing dps, but as a tank, your job is to take hits and hold aggro. You are literally a mana/damage sponge (BTW, cat dps was sooo bad, it was an internal joke by the devs. This is proven in the class calls in BWL…Druids got put into LOLCATS mode).
Not going to lie. Druid is one of the easier classes to level, but that is only for playing Resto spec. The other specs in the class do struggle. Feral, till you can get some decent greens, is as painful as a rogue. Maybe more so, because rogue’s have survival abilities where ferals were considered rogue/tank lite. As you have seen, you bear-up, stack health pool, keep a lot of healing pots on hand, time your FR, and MAUL, MAUL, MAUL (generates aggro like a mofo)
While yes, STR > AGI is correct for bear, it isn’t for cat. During leveling it doesn’t matter which you get, that’s purely endgame. HOWEVER pretty much your best stat beyond hit cap is haste rating for bear. More autos = more rage = more abilities = more threat. A secondary stat you can look for is dodge.
The extra doesn’t matter for a tank holding aggro, you need to be able to generate raw threat which means you need to be able to get the rage to begin with.
It’s very rare you’d be able to root in an instance. In open world, sure, but you can also tank 2-4 mobs easily in bear form and kill them without CC.
And idk wtf this is about. Druid is rough till 10, smooth sailing to 20, then 20-~55 it’s the fastest grind spec in the game, only having competition with hunters and mages. You have little to no downtime, can easily solo elites in open world, have a pretty simple rotation in claw spam till fero bite.
Now as for OP
Yeah, it’s claw spam until you get fero bite. Then it’s claw spam to 5p then fero bite. You only use rip/rake on mobs that the fight will last longer than 15s iirc.
Yes. You swipe vs 3 targets and rotate faerie fires (when you got feral version) to every mob. Below 3 targets you just maul and FF.
Feral is pretty boring overall, but it’s very smooth.
I think you guys forget, Faerie Fire takes you out of Bear/Cat…
I was doing it wrong based on the guides to use FF, until I realized there was a talent also called FF which allows you to cast while shapeshifted.
I’m not really struggling as a tank… I’m having a difficult time maintaining aggro on all the mobs
That is the name of the game in Classic, and not just a Feral problem. Threat generation is all over the place in classic. It is strongly recommended to be on the higher end of levels in dungeons while leveling (so if the enemies are level 20-25, you want to be probably atleast level 24). This is because if you are a lower level you are more likely to miss, and they are more likely to dodge/parry, which means 0 damage/threat from you. Also, if your group members are a higher level than you it is more likely that they will pull aggro. I’ve been leveling a rogue in classic, and pretty much no tank can hold aggro when I pop Adrenaline Rush (5 minute cd) and Blade Flurry (2 minute cd).
Like almost 90% of the time they will lose aggro. I usually just pop evasion when I use it so I dont take any damage. Don’t be surprised if dps pull a bit but you definitely dont want to have dps running around dying. If that’s the case then they need to slow down on dps. Heck, even the healer can pull aggro if you take a bit hit and they heal you before you are able to generate threat.
Again, this is classic, you are not steamrolling anything, you overpull, you die (unless your over gear) the encounter. Part of tanking (which is what the OP is asking about) is controlling the flow of the encounter. So yes, you will be using roots where you can (CC is king in classic). As I stated, it is better than nothing (yes, I know it would quite occasionally break on its own damage).
Try leveling as a restro in vanilla and you will have all the niceties of the feral spec AND
be able to heal like a champ. BTW, FB is a garbage ability, always was. RNG is not your friend. As far as soloing elites in cat form, I am not buying what you’re trying to sell. I know you could easily do it in bear form. It would have a higher time to kill, but you would come out ahead. In cat form, sell your story to the National Enquirer.
There is no disinformation in what I said. He was talking about bearing it up and dealing with threat generation. BTW, hate to burst your bubble, there is no haste gear and no way to get faster swings as the attack speed was hard coded at 1sec timer for kitty and 2.5 secs for bear (if I remember correctly) in vanilla. And yes, we argued about it back then because unlike the other tanks, we had zero scaling in weapon speed. It was flat rate.
Also, like Adam made a reference to as far as aggro, the dps had to learn when they could blast off. That is not a tanking issue, that is dps learning to hold off on the intiial pulls because they would get aggro and die before the tank could establish themselves. There was a very good reason you waited to dps until the tank had their sunders on the bosses (or wait till the count of 5 for other tanks). Unlike retail, you couldn’t just steamroll a dungeon. Try that in the summoning room in the ORIGINALY designed Scholomance and you will/would wipe the group every time.
There are a couple things more I did forget, and for that I apologize, do not forget to get your weapon skill up for the weapon you are using. It DOES affect your ability to hit, even in forms (the irony is it does NOT use the weapon speed).
The second thing, remember, a bear generates rage by taking hits and putting points into Furor. The harder the punch to your face, the more rage you generate. Also, the more things hitting you also helps.
To answer that question, by and large, they didn’t care for being a feral because endgame was not friendly to them at all (DRUIDZ = HEALZ + Priest mana battery). Unless you were in a power position in the guild/s at the time (and even then, it was a pain) a feral druid was (and from what i hear today) the lowest on the totem pole for gearing in endgame content. The gear you would like to use is going to go to rogues before you. The rings and trinkets are going to go to the warriors. You might get them in time, after everyone, and their brother, gets their gear (and hope they don’t have alts or kiss it goodbye). Chances are though; they are going to move to the next tier leaving you wanton.
I loved being a feral (still do for the most part), but Vanilla through TBC was not fun. You had to fight for every piece of gear and justify why you should have it when it should/could go to a class that would utilize it better (imagine having top DKP in a raid and being told you could not bid on items you needed in order to do your role smoother. Better yet, spending DKP on a Heavy Dark Iron Ring (BIS for feral tank) and being told it was going to someone’s alt). Itemization, by and large, did not exist until AQ. It was all about HEALZ MEEEZ.
I agree with the majority of your post but this is untrue. Weaponskill is maxxed for druid in form - you don’t need to level it. The only time you would need to level weapon skill is if you plan on smacking somebody out of form
I’m not really interested in arguing someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
If you level as resto, you miss out on a lot of key talents that make feral extremely fluid in leveling, e.g. cost reductions & things like crit/ff talents. You’re also going to be building into intel/spirit gear for those talents to be beneficial in any way, which means you are doing consistently lower DPS due to the lack of agi/str gear. Now you CAN subsidize this by just having 2 sets of gear, but then you’re having to spend more time to do something inefficiently when you can just as easily heal any dungeon with a bit of water in feral spec, than carrying around 2 sets of gear. There is a reason people specifically say resto talents are useless in leveling. We’ve tested them for 10+ years
Yes, Ferocious Bite sucks to press, but at the end of the day if the encounter goes to the length you have 5 points to do the bite then you’re going to press it because it’s the highest damaging ability at that point, so it does not suck to press in the scheme of things.
Gnomer wep. MC trinkets.
This is irrelevant. You adjust to the group, you have the means to quickly get aggro back if someone blows their load too fast. Yes, DPS should wait a moment to let tanks get aggro, but bears do not struggle with aggro, especially when FF is talented.
Weapon skills do not affect your inform hits. They never have, never will. You can have 0 weapon skill and still function in form.
Yet for some reason I decided I need 300 weapon skill in every type druid could equip and unarmed back in vanilla. At least I have a couple cool feats of strength now?!
I think it was more boredom while waiting for raids to start. Our raid leader started getting things going 30 minutes before raid start so he could have a proper head count and align anyone who might need to sit, and I would usually be on even before that. To kill the time I would go out to Blasted lands and just melee down an elite in caster form while keeping myself alive with heals.
