Can someone clear some things up for me on my druid please; I’m level 32 currently. I’m maining resto druid and run dungeons a lot. How bad is it for me to wear cloth gear as a druid? Almost everyone I see says, if I need on cloth or wear any cloth that I’m trolling. Yet cloth gear gives way more intell/spirit for healing than leather does. Also, is it true that not wearing full leather you lose like 5% intellect or something?
As far as Classic gameplay goes you’re not. It’s quite common for healers or casters to downgrade to cloth, and warriors or paladins to use leather.
With it being HC there is an obvious trade-off in armor and if you go for a lot of int/spirit based gear you will suffer on HP as well so there’s definitely a risk versus reward in the sense that you are choosing performance over some extra survivability. Moreover, for druids bear form multiplies your armor based on your gear so a lot of cloth means a lot less armor that you’ll get if you get into a sticky situation.
That was introduced as a Cataclysm pre-patch mechanic so it’s not applicable to applicable to Vanilla thruWoTLK. It added an armor specialization under the general tab of the spellbook stating you’d gain 5% main stat when wearing appropriate armor, and was done to curb the kind of behavior where classes would downgrade their armor for better stats.
I can’t say for a druid but on my pally that does healing I use lots of cloth gear. It has way better stats than what the plate gives for healing. I run a holy spec in HC and use cloth on it. I have seen one or two others doing so as well. Works great for pally. I’d assume it would perform similarly for a druid heals as well.