I tanked five mans and off tanked raids as a feral druid in vanilla.
I also did respectable DPS when they didn’t need me to tank. Not top but far from the bottom of the damage meters.
Using your forms matters… kitty if you need dps, tank if they need that, and even throw on healing gear from time to time and don’t forget you can battle Rez, have other buffs, and can innervate!
The amount of “Druid sucks” disinformation out there is wrong. Good players are good players. There are plenty of lousy warriors and rogues out there.
Not in Vanilla. You’ll want resto points and the strategy is to kite and stay alive while bleeding your opponent down. Doing a 1v2 is out of the question.
Yes, but many players balk at the druid’s lack of a conventional rez.
Without powershifting (normal effort) ? Pretty bad. With powershifting and lots of consumeables (tryhard) ? Maybe average. But also with a supply of Manual Crowd Pummelers (maximum tryhard) ? Actually pretty good.
I dunno, man. I am running a raiding guild as a druid. I expect to pace the guild in leveling 1-60 (druids are fast levelers) and will be able to tank, dps or heal guild runs as needed in dungeons.
Once I get to 60, I will probably tank/off-tank in MC until our warriors are all in place, then I will switch to healing in a spec that will allow me to heal or off-tank with a gear swap.
For my PvE druid, I was looking at 0/30/21 (natures swiftness is nice) with 5/5 thick hide. Used this spec before during those original times and it worked quite well and lets you backup heal quite nicely.
I plan to have a shaman or druid alt for grinding. If I pick druid, I’ll be tanking as well as grinding with this spec: https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/druid/014005001-5300521323202151-05
Heart of the Wild makes me curious how good my healing will be, but clearly it’s not a healing spec.
1 - on 5 mans they are pretty good
2- almost ukillable in wpwp but dont expect to get many kills
3- yes just be mindfull for the lack of rez
4- same gear level and skill , like 60% of a rogues dps maybe
5- for casuals? Druids are preeeetty good, raids will always want at least 2 Druids, you need to make friends tho
Feral Druids can tank just fine, especially in MC and BWL. The only boss they won’t be able to do is probably Chromaggus because Warriors typically use cooldowns to deal with his enrage. They’ll have way higher threat generation than any p1/p2 warriors when using MCPs.
Omen of clarity for a tank in a raid enviornment doesn’t really do as much as you think. Druid tanks have an over abundance of rage when tanking bosses, to the point where the omen of clarity procs usually result in overcapped rage. Its nice for 5 man dungeons where the mobs don’t hit as hard and you have less rage but yiu can get by without it.
As far as 0/30/21 goes for healing it actually has an advantage over resto and moonglow on fights where you are a dispell bot. For other fights it roughly equals out with moonglow, less mana efficient but more mana to compensate.
There is no such thing as an “overabundance” of rage. Swipe (20) and Maul (15) will spend more rage than you can ever bring in.
Less mana efficient but more mana does nothing to address weaker heals. Weaker heals do not keep people alive in situations of duress.
Great logic. Its the same logic used to justify Ret Paladins in a raid setting or Enhancement Shaman or any number of other under-performing pvp specs that the rest of the raid gets to carry for the sole purpose of one selfish person.
Druids can tank in 5 man dungeons all day. In raid if they are tanking you will usually see them in an offtank position. And this can be good because it means less gear competition for MTs/plate.
Where the druid tank can shine is they can have the highest TPS generation. So in a situation where druid can tank it allows the DPS roles to open up more. This can come into play on specific raid fights, but mostly it can be used once a raid is on farm and you just want to blast through it.
people tend to forget how miserable life is as a strictly healing spec in things OTHER then raiding. respecing aint cheap.
For those of you saying 0/30/21 is bad because it lacks omen of clarity for bear, i want to point out that without omen of clarity i can out threat every warrior tank out there without even trying.
I will concede that it isnt the best healing spec out there, but since your goal is to bounce between rolls to fill in the gaps, it isnt a big deal. its just a little extra healing for heal intensive fights, and a strong threaty tank for increasing the dps you can dish out in a fight (by allowing dps to open up a bit more.
If you think having one or two ret/farel/ non-“meta” picks are the biggest reason why your raid wiped I would say your group has bigger problems…
Also it’s pretty selfish to think that having higher damage equals carrying them, maybe you didn’t see that brez/innervate/etc. which shifted the fight in your favor. But I would imagine you wouldn’t notice that as apparently the only thing that matters are dps measurements in determining how successful of a class/spec someone is.
There is no reason to do this if all you can do is be “better than nothing”.
A Druid specced to tank/dps shares enough of the core elements of both specs to perform this way (yes they are still inferior in both roles but at least they have the core elements).
A druid healing cannot split into a tanking / dps role without severely affecting their ability to heal.
No raid needs a healer to tank an add for a fight when any of the numerous warriors can do it or feral offtanks can without sacrificing performance in their main role.
Don’t know much about Feral, but I run a build like this to level: https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/druid/014050130250135--50510310501
At 40, I was able to sit on a 43 warrior’s head while he was ganking in Redridge until he ran away, only used Cat Form to open with Pounce. This was on a private server, so we’ll have to see how well Entangling Roots holds through Moonfire to see how well this actually works.
I take Improved Thorns over Improved Entangling Roots because I play mainly to PVE.
One of the most misunderstood aspects of feral is how outrageous their wpvp is. Ferals have 3 different types of spell classes. When used properly they can kill almost anyone and never die even in some 3v1 scenario. It takes some experience though which is why feral pvp is never really realized in vanilla except by a few players.
The ability to open in stealth, tank dps cooldowns in bear, run away, heal, then re-initiate (often in stealth) is devastating. Powershifting is very good burst dps and moonfire spam can be an extremely strong option in many fights. There isn’t another class that can take as much advantage from grenades as feral druids either.
Vanilla feral druids counter rogues and mages especially well, and can make fools out of warriors. It’s a ridiculous class. End game classic people will be begging for feral druid nerfs.
the whole point of bring a druid is to have this sort of versatility in a raid. otherwise you’d have a raid full of warriors, priests and mages, with a handful of hunters and that would be it.
also “Not the best” is not the same as being “completely terrible” as you seem to be suggesting. 0/30/21 is actually a fairly stable healing build if you know what you’re doing. it’s not like druids are ever going to top charts in anything except bear tps.
In the DPS role, a feral druid can perform on par with all the other melee DPS but theres a catch.
You need to farm a very specific item from gnomeragan called the manual crowd pummeler, this item has 3 uses only which means you need to farm them as a consumable.
There are also many other consumables you are gonna want if you want first place on the DPS meter like juju’s, R.O.I.D.S and fire water etc.
With all of these items and mastery over your formshifting rotation you will be able to pull 1k dps with good gear.
You also bring a buff to the raid that no other druid or member will bring in the form of leader of the pack which gives your group 3% melee crit bonus, which is huge.
Ideally any guild who knows there stuff will want a good feral druid in there raid but the effort required to pull off this position often puts off most druids from stepping up to this role.
