Feedback: Druids

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
124

My take as a less experienced druid on the PTR.

Feral:
As I’m not familiar with the talent choices and what has changed, I used the starter build provided by the game. I felt like my damage was good, on par with the party. This was the first spec I timed the new dungeon with. Pros: good mix of single target, aoe, very happy with defensives and ability to stay alive, self-healing and healing others, mobility and being able to avoid incoming damage. Cons: no real wow moments, setting up burst windows didn’t feel particularly satisfying, felt a bit middle-of-the-road.

Balance:
Using the default “starter” talent build. This felt surprisingly intuitive to play. Excellent burst, amazing aoe, lots of fun. It felt squishier than feral with higher output. Server shut down halfway through dungeon run. Looking forward to playing this some more.

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I primarily focus on Bear, Resto, and Moonkin (in that order). My feedback: In a word, clunky. The new Lycra’s talent just needs to go back to the drawing board. Power swapping for a short buff is dumb. Magic DR on ironfur is great. Kinda wish it was tuned a little higher, but that can always come later.

It’s not something you can pivot on in a single cycle, but you need to answer important questions about the specs before they go anywhere. Right now, it’s clunky and it’s treading water. It takes 7-10 business days to get your damage going.

The payoffs for playing well aren’t big enough. Too many talents overall, and too many of them are just spreadsheetable calculations between 0.8% and 1.9% throughout differences. Lunar beam shouldn’t need such a huge commitment for a central spell, but honesty that’s only a problem because of how one sided the choice is between fairy bear and big bear.

For the love of Ysera, please buff physical bear. Raze damage, UF, pulverize, all need looking at. Silencing roar needs to come back to even have a shot at playing backup to paladins.

Lastly, if you want cat weaving to work, kitty abilities need to extend hots or do some return healing, a la Teachings of the Monastery.

Recap:

  1. Talents are better than live, but they are not close to good. Too many useless/boring/forgettable talents.
  2. Not enough choices in builds.
  3. Shif-mentum sucks. Nobody wants this. Kill it with fire.
  4. All 4 specs still suffer ramping issues. I think mobs need more HP in general, or the burst profile that other specs have needs to be reigned in. The discrepancy is too large right now.
  5. Paladins are out of control. We need more tools or they need less.
  6. Pick a lane on off-form use. Healers turning into cats between damage only works if there’s a period between damages. Bears turning into cats is too dangerous. Moonkins turning into bears is too restrictive.
  7. Figure out what you want druids to be. Are we “just like _______(warrior, rogue, priest, mage), but worse” or do we have our own identity? Why is our hybrid tax so much steeper other classes?

Bonus feedback: you need to buff tanks and nerf caster mobs. At this stage, I’d almost buff them to the point where a tank causing a group wipe means he went afk, and then reevaluate.

Fun: Pulling 3 packs together and assigning and pulling off the CC needed to get that pack down. Risk is a choice with a good payoff.

Not fun: every pack needs all 5 members to execute CC to keep the deaths to a minimum. There’s no “slow down” speed, you either execute at this level or you just don’t pass. No risk, because overpulling is an instant wipe. No reward, because that’s the baseline.

Let’s say you work for a company and your KPI is 3 in an example metric. If your boss gives you a bonus for hitting 4, that’s motivation. If your boss just changes your goal to a 4 lest you lose your job, that’s gonna make you take another job.

8 Likes
126

Feral is cooked. Stick a fork in her, she is done.

I was on the PTR for a couple hours, and for what it’s worth, the new teir set is doing LESS damage at 668 than I am doing in retail currently. Another thing, as I figured it was going to happen, the set bonus at 2 pieces is a joke. A cruel joke. I watched that bonus get no higher than 6 stacks, otherwise it was averaging between 2-4 stacks, before resetting to zero. Also, the 4 piece, the periodic damage at 4% is not even noticeable (I am not kidding…maybe it is bugged, but I doubt it). The changes on the Druid side of the tree, are negligible. It IS better, but there is so much in the tree that should be baseline (stampeding roar and its extra talents…a waste, especially that far down the tree).

There are nerfs to the feral on the Druid side abilities. I get why they would tone them down, but you reduce the % for barrowed power now, then when that borrowed power is revoked (and it will be), we go back to being worse than when we started. This is very poor spec development. I have said it once, I will say it again, 2004 called and want their Druid dev philosophy back.

This goes live, I do not expect to see anyone bringing a feral for anything serious other than PVP. It IS that pathetic. Sure, it is fun to play, whoopie!! This is an MMO and if you want to do anything serious, you have to be able to get in groups, if you don’t have friends online. This current mess is definitely going to get the feral spec sidelined for better, more consistent damage output/throughput. The RNG in damage output is beyond dismal at this point. A little RNG isn’t bad. This is so over the top, it isn’t fun. Maybe some folks will like slot machine dps, but this isn’t going to turn anyone on to the feral spec. FB was already RNG hell, this just exasperates the problem.

BUT, at least the caster classes are blasting off and doing more DPS than they are currently doing in Retail.

6 Likes
127

Copying the character over again and comparing live to ptr in the exact same gear (instead of the new tier and trinkets for testing) and it looks like resto got a flat heal nerf somewhere.

Stats are exactly the same outside of ptr giving me ~3% more mastery, talents are the same bar the new routing, no difference in gear but all my heals (class tree, spec tree and hero talents) are like 6% less.
Combined with the new mastery diminishing returns pretty much nullifying the 30% mastery increase after the first hot and how bad they’re scaling afterwards it looks like its overall a downgrade to the healing and playstyle.

Less reward for layering, the compensation from the mastery buff not making up the difference even at the first hot and a flat number nerf on top. Id prefer not to have a repeat of Season 1 opening where we’re strung along by minor buffs for multiple weeks when we can see the under tuning right now. The diminishing returns shouldn’t kick in til at least the 3rd hot as thats where our normal application sits; rejuv, regrowth, wildgrowth or where lifebloom sits solo with harmonious blooming.

3 Likes
128

I just watched several streamers and it’s very, very sad how Rdruid is doing when it comes to dps.
They’ve globally nerfed our dps by 20%, to give us two eligible talents that increase our feral or boomy damage…

Why was there a need to nerf our dps?
Maybe to prevent us from abusing doing so much dps?
Why would we break the recount/details?

I’ve seen several streamers playing MW and almost all of them have exceeded 600-700k at +10 or even more overall.
In several pulls they’ve done between 800-1m dps.

While they nerf us?
I think the best thing would be to revert that 20% of reduced damage and leave those two new talents so we can take them and improve our low damage.

Or give us a more noticeable buff in DPS, it is not fun to be one of the healers with lower DPS than others knowing the effort required to change forms every moment.

2 Likes
129

Until they make HotS actually HEAL, they will just be maintenance buffs like Slice and Dice.

Cast 3-4 Slice and Dice… okay NOW you can heal.

…which is a boring chore.

2 Likes
130

There’s a lot of hate in here about Paladins being too OP - when really, the issue here stems from frustration from the druid community. If you take a good look at the Paladin Class tree and new hero talents there are great synergies, solid class tree abilities, hero talents that are worthwhile and across all 3 (class, spec, and hero) talent trees there are synergies that reward you for playing well. Extra holy power on interrupt, small heal on cleanse, extra dmg and healing for good rotation and playstyle. CD reduction or extra healing for using heals on low health targets. Saving the day, rewarded. FUN. This should be the precedent for ALL classes.

Druid, however, has NONE of this.

Our hero talents are TERRIBLE across the board. Most hero talents are weighted at less than 1 point in the regular tree, that is not very “heroic” most are just the same defacto ~1-2% output synergy. These are just formula increases are are NOT fun. It feels that Druid development has lost the “FUN” formula for years now.

We need Identity put back into our class tree, and remove defacto form specific abilities to just be baked into the class. The new changes has seen a few removed - but it’s not enough. Rake, Rip, Rejuv, Sunfire, Ironfur, Hibernate, Maim, Soothe and Cyclone, Stampeding roar should all be baked into the class.
Solar Beam? It’s an old school Moonkin identity spell, those days are OVER, we are DRUIDS now, THAT would be a good class skill. Accessible by all forms. Balance should still have access to skullbash, it’s no different to shaman having windshear, I don’t see the issue, especially as they have to shift to use it.
Ysera’s gift, resto minor healing talent - another perfect class ability that would give a small amount of group healing for just having a druid in the party/raid.
Adaptive swarm, another good CLASS ability.
Convoke the spirits - CLASS, although it’s COMPLETELY useless for bear.

Why do we suffer with multiple talents to make a CD effective? It’s NOT fun, what’s worse if that you’ve added hero talents that add more. 5 for bear incarn, 6 with EC, 5 for feral incarn, 4 for balance incarn, 5 with EC? What? Why?
The new tier set gives more AoE to Balance? REALLY? Balance is ONLY effective for AOE right now because of starfall. All other areas Balance struggles. The ONLY reason to bring a balance druid is for MOTW (cause 3% dmg), and AoE dmg which is 100% starfall specifically on large pulls with mobs of high HP. It’s certainly got nothing to do with Lunarbeam. BUFF Single Target DMG through interesting HERO TALENTS.
Bear, Balance, and Kitty are ALL some of the WORST performing specs in the game right now - I don’t understand how the changes made are so timid - we’re left wondering if they are buffs or nerfs - and from testing it’s seeming like the latter.

Resto has been turned from a hot class to an old school paladin healer that just spams FoL (which is regrowth), not fun, ruined all our identity. Because we now have to HOT, then spam regrowth there is no time to DPS - so either buff our hots, or provide passive ways to reapply. We struggle on burst aoe healing (which for some reason in S1 TWW there were TONS in dungeons) because we have nothing. Our AoE healing is spamming regrowth one target at a time.

Have you actually read what the base healing is on Wildgrowth? I think it’s like 220k over 7 seconds (that’s with the 2 talents for 30% less drop off) at 630ilvl? That’s 4% of a player HP, 2% of a tank at equi-level? On a 10sec cd ofc, cause it’s a STRONG heal??? I guess this is what happens when the class hasn’t been looked at for years and are just given blanket aura adjustments - it makes the HOTs less powerful and we are left crutch healing with Regrowth.

It seems that you need to ask yourself, what makes world of warcraft fun for players and what is NOT fun?

Raid - Output - there aren’t many other mechanics in raids other than movement, and output. Output comes in two forms - burst dmg/healing during burn phases, and damage/heal versatility from single/multi-target. All classes should bring both to the table. Feeling like you contribute and perform at a level that matters - atm, it feels like raids bring a solo druid for motw, certainly that would be the preference these days.

Dungeon/M+/Delve - Same for raid, but add interrupts/defensives/CC - pugs are NOTORIOUSLY bad, because it seems they don’t have these on their bar. Probably due to the lack of use in Raids - idk. But providing rewards for output based on effective CC/interrupt would be a GREAT way to encourage effective PUG dungeon groups. Do NOT nerf access to these tools for any spec - we want to PROVIDE tools for players and ENCOURAGE them to use them. Clutch saves, turning the tide of an encounter, last minute interrupt, heal, getting through a dungeon deathless - all happy times - not just for the player but for the whole team. Fun.

PVP - sorry, I don’t do this anymore, I hung up my PvP gloves in Cata.

8 Likes
131

It honestly took me a second to realize you were talking about healing instead of tanking…

2 Likes
132

Our hero talents in general are boring. They don’t change gameplay at all.

Your rotation literally does not change no matter which hero talent we pick.

And also, Wild stalker is the only one that adds any new visual animations. It makes vines grow on your enemies and allies and then they burst into flowers or thorns. And when you barkskin a ton of flowers grow behind you.

Grove guardians gets ZERO new animations or spell effects. The dream petal ability uses the same spell effects as when lifebloom blooms, and that’s the only thing added.

So I find myself using wildstalker even if it’s not meta because Grove guardians is just so boring.

Are there any other hero talents that come with zero new animations?

Because the other druid ones are fun. Chosen of Elune comes with rotation differences and new visual effects for Balance. Only using lunar eclipse is new and interesting.

Druid of the pack has been animations and allows for more shapeshifting mid combat.

Grove Guardians doesn’t change gameplay at all and there’s no new animations. It’s just entirely passive. Why?

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I think the mastery change is a good start but all abilities need a baseline buff because of this.
For pvp itd be nice to have more options of not having to take treants if you play wildstalker, not taking treeform either and having a convoke usable in pvp or a pvp talent option that makes convoke more viable. This would open up options tremendously. It feels like these are locked in, it would be cool to do more catweaving in pvp.

1 Like
134

Is this AI generated post from Blizz employee?

135

Blizzard,

Here a few suggestions for you based on my experience with my druid.

Class Tree side:

Remove Improved Sunfire and just make it base line again that Sunfire applies its’ damage over time effect to all enemies within 8 yards.

I would like to see the radius of Sunfire DoT effect increased to 10 yards.

Fluid Form as a capstone talent feels bad and the position of it right now places it out of the way where I feel I have to give up on something else just to take it.

Lycara’s Meditation talent seems great in all but out side of healing, cat DPS, and Moonkin DPS it has no real impact for Guardain unless you are quick on your transformation or if you take Fluid Form and have good group that doesn’t pull for you and your not chain pulling groups together.

Lore of the Grove and Instincts of the Claw feels like they should share a node like Circle of the Wild and Circle of the Heavens.

Forestwalk, although on paper seems great, feels bad to take unless you have the points to get to it as Guardian. As almost no other specialization would take this except for Restoration if they had the points to spare.

Balance Tree:

There is a lot of talents that we have to take in the first 4 rows. With only 8 talent points needed to get to row 5 there isn’t much room for choice. First off you must take Force of Nature if you are going Keeper of the Grove, and unless you take Warrior of Elune picking Elune’s Chosen feels bad and reduces your over all DPS by a lot. The three instant casts of Starfire makes up a lot of damage output when combined with Starsurge as it is almost a 1:1 ratio. Starting off you have to take 4 talents right away leaving you with 4 to spend. Of the two connections following the choice node for FoN and WoE only one is worth taking and that is Nature’s Grace. Leaving you with 3 more points between 4 talents which arguably only one doesn’t impact as much, but in truth all for are almost required making you down one point in the end to spend in the middle or bottom part of the tree.

The choice node between Wild Surges and Stellar Flare should be split. We have a single target ability being Wrath, an AoE ability being Starfire, a single target DoT being Moonfire, an AoE DoT being Sunfire, a single target spender being Starsurge, and an AoE spender being Starfall, but but to take the DoT that is of Astral Damage we have to give up on Wild Surge, which in almost all cases is stronger. I personally can’t think when Stellar Flare would be stronger. I would love to have access to Stellar Flare without giving up the critical strike chance. I would like to see a few changes made to Stellar Flare also. First off I would like to see it become an instant cast ability like the other two DoT abilities. This alone would change how we would interact with it. this ability also would let us play into Waning Twilight a bit easier as we don’t have to hope for the proc of Astral Smolder. Maybe you could combine Wild Surges into the talent Astral Smolder, not making it a choice node but rather giving you both effects for the 1 point. Or maybe take away Sunseeker Mushrooms and add Wild Surges here.

Talking about the Mushrooms I would like the Sunseeker Mushrooms proc chance increased to give you 2-3 procs per minute because having only 1-2 procs a minute feels really bad, but I would like this talent removed as it isn’t that great. Right now if you take Wild Mushrooms you coul have the DoT effect they give off almost up 100% of the time if you stagger the uses of the ability. I see that you are trying to push the Wild Mushrooms again and I can give you a suggestion on that as well. Remove the charges and make it a 10 second cooldown ability and have it replace Sunfire while having it also act like Sunfire when it comes to our mastery and other related abilities. Maybe increase the DoT length, which in turn would either increae the cooldown of the ability or take away the cooldown that way we could use it more often on trash packs which seems what it is made for.

Balance of All Things being a two point talent still feels bad. I know you want to keep a set amount of point options open but could yo uplease make this a one point talent.

Could you move Force of Nature to be more in line with Fury of Elune/New Moon? It is understood that these talents are the core of the two hero talent trees but as it stands right now Keeper of the Grove gets the best of both worlds. Elune’s Chosen is only a bit ahead in certain areas if you are skilled enough to play it. If Force of Nature was swapped with Harmony of Heavens it would not be as easy to take both set of talents for Keeper of the Grove and maybe balance the hero talents a bit more.

Feral:

Please let feral cast Rebirth in cat form. I’m liking Feral for the most part and don’t have anything else at this time.

Guardian:

Having Raze finally replace maul is great and about time. This change hopefully bring Druid of the Claw hero talent choice up a bit as not playing Elune’s Chosen as Guardian feels really bad.

There feels like there is a lot more talent points in the Guardian tree then the others.

Balance: 40 point options
Feral: 41 point options
Guardian: 49 point options
Restoration: 49 point options

Can we pleaes trim this down, there are 12 point options alone in the top area before the middle area. Both Guardian and Restoration need a trim down please. 40 point options right now seems the best bet. It would look nicer on players so they don’t feel so bad not taking other options. Addressing this first then assessing the talents would need to happen.

Restoration:

Please see above for point options and this should be addressed first being handling the overall play of the spec.

3 Likes
136

Just a detail:

Would please Efflorescence swap places with Soul of the Forest? The former is almost useless in PVP, but we’re forced to always grab it to access the left side of the tree. With Resto being so mana-starved, the cost (and GCD!) of one Efflorescence would be better used somewhere else.

Would be a PVP QoL that I don’t think would impact PVE builds at all.

137

Or just redesign the mastery entirely

138

They done that to Restro a couple times before, so why not.

139

i think it’s funny they’re re-designing the mastery, to almost exactly what an ability like Adaptive Swarm did for us in the first place…

spot healing was fine in DF, then they broke it, now they’re adding a fix that doesn’t really change the fact that my spec feels a lot emptier than it did in years…

c’mon guys :grimacing:

140

Just gonna keep suggesting this…

Looking at the initial trees

  1. The general tree feels WAY better. Looks a bit cumbersome, but the pathing is much nicer and we get to pick up more talents. Capstone talents still feel very underwhelming and not something many people are going to be excited about. I like the Symbiotic talent, though it may just be because I miss Symbiosis so much.
  2. Bear tree… I appreciate that you gave us a nice talent in Ursol’s Warding. That is sorely needed, however here are a couple of issues with our tree that really have needed fixing for a LONG time
  • Talents feel very locked in because of all the 2pt nodes. You fixed this issue over in the general tree, please look at it for the bear tree as well.
  • Still no reason to pick Pulverize.
  • Maul and Raze feel even less important to pick up now.

Suggestions:

  • Pulverize changed to a large AOE strike for initial aggro and removing the thrash consuming. The DR can stay, but this should be the button we want if we need help picking up packs in M+.
  • Maul and Raze should an effect where every 2-3 of them outside of Beserk/Incarn should proc a Ravage if in DotC Hero tree. This would smooth out the rotation for DotC and provide a real reason to use Raze again in difficult content.
  • Drop Flashing Claws and Scintillating Moonlight and all Row 5 talents dropped to 1pt for same effect as 2. This frees us up to take talents we simply cannot ever reach.
  • Beserk talents all combined into Beserk talent on row 4. Move Ursoc’s Fury and Twin Moonfire into the spots vacated by the bottom Beserk talents.
  • Ravage 20% increased chance to proc from autoattack and costs no rage, deals damage in a cone in front of the Druid without requiring a target in melee range.
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For where it’s at in the tree, pulverize is insanely weak. Compare it with lunar beam (and equally inaccessible talent) and it’s not even close. I’d like to see it become guardians version of Shield Charge. A pull starter for sure.

DotC needs a lot of help. It has basically a 0% play rate.

These DRs should be baked into their respective capstones.

Yes. Build-a-Bear is unique, but in practice it’s just a tax. Combine and reduce.

Just an extra raze then. Kinda boring, but it is what it is.

We need a 300-400% increase in UF. Its defensive value was cut drastically in the beta with the increase to HP pools (similar to what happened to WoG, which got fixed). As long a physical bear is crutched up with this, it’s critical that it’s fixed. Of course, I’d rather replace it with something less silly, but a good baby step is getting it to work at all.

2 Likes
142

The new class tree is a big step in the right direction.

One issue I haven’t seen mentioned yet is:
Why is Innervate gatekeeping Symbiotic Relationship, Forestwalk and Nature’s Vigil?

Compared to the nodes in a parallel postion, Lycara’s Teachings and Oakskin are passives useful to all druid in every content. But Innervate can’t even be used by 3 out of 4 speccs without being grouped with a healer. And for resto there is the anti-synergy with the specc-talent Forest’s Flow (because Clearcasting can’t be consumed, effectively reducing healing throughput during Innervate).
So Innervate is only useful in raids and almost useless in all other forms of content.

This seems to me like it goes against the design-goal of reducing the amount of nodes we have to pick but don’t benefit us in the the normal course of play.

I would love to see the position of Innervate switched with Forestwalk (or some other passive node that is useful to all druids in every content).

3 Likes
143

The Resto Druid mastery buff needs to be increased more.

Regrowth, Reju, and Lifebloom(5 stacks) on a target heals for significantly LESS.

1 HOT heals for slightly more. Having only 1-2 HOTs should give a significantly bigger increase than it does right now.

3 Likes