For me, the word “casually” makes this pretty easy. So far as I’m concerned you can casually do Anything as Anything. Have fun! No, really, have fun.
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This. Whether resto, or feral resto hybrid for offtank/offheal. you have a TON of things to do to keep things going. Super druid amazingness has saved many a wipe. Pretty much all the dps chart toppers hit their 3-4 buttons over and over, min maxed for doing exactly that. And that’s great! We need deeps!.
But lemme know the last time a mage or hunter or fury warrior b-rezzed the priest, innervated them, WHILE picking up heals on the MT/group, shifted bear, taunted the boss so the MT could get debufs off for a wee bit, shifted to cat once things smoothed out. and carried on doing their job.
And gave zero f’s about topping any of the charts.
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There are some tryhards posting here lately who believe that “topping charts” on 15 year old content is srsbiz.
But Sortaokay makes a great point.
I felt pretty much the same way about ret the entire time I mained my paladin (2006-present in “retail.”)
Most people do not understand the idea of utility.
Most utility can be brought by other specs of the same class while doing other roles more powerfully, or aren’t actually all that useful. You need Druids to Soothe Beasts and Hibernate, but those skills aren’t exactly deal breakers in PvE Raiding.
Anything a Ret can bring, a Holy Paladin can, and right now Holy Paladins are in pretty high demand because of their raw throughput which is only going to get better as they get more Int/Crit. Outside of Feral Tanks, the hybrids are all idealized as healers, which is why T2 stats and onward are the way they are.
Mediocre spec played by a skilled player >> “Meta spec” played by a mediocre player.
Best groups I’ve been in back in the day and now have been with folks who understand mechanics and help each other out. Worst groups are the ones where players think that they only have one job, and that job is topping meters.
Classic raids were not designed to be run by only warriors, mages, priests and rogues. Classes were given multiple specs to give the game a lot of flavor. This notion of “meme” spec is ruining the game for many because a select group are using mechanics outside of the designer’s intent to enforce certain ideals (look up the definition of meta-gaming, if you must… it’s been clearly defined.)
Not topping the meter is not synonymous with being carried. Historically, damage meters have also counted actions, track heals, track buffs and cleanses. I used to raid as ret, and even though my DPS wasn’t high at all, I was doing a number of other things that some folks were not always paying attention to. Once folks noticed, I wasn’t only welcome in raids, but wanted.
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Ya, feral druids are fine. I loooove druids in both raids and pvp. Solid dps, great utility, hots for mobile fights, the game’s only Brez. Would be looking to bring 2-3 feral druids to each raid, and even let em tank or dps.
FFS. They went with 1.12. A lot of the content was nerfed and classes were buffed.
You could probably have 20% of the raid not put one point in to their talent trees and still clear the content.
A Druid can raid with whatever spec they want if their guild isnt full of asshats.
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Yeah but there will always be those people who think 15 year old, nerfed content (that has hundreds of videos on how to low-man or cheese it) is still srs biz.
I will say, I don’t believe most of them really do feel that way. I do believe many of them are just trying to get people going. There was some clown who made some evaluation thread recently, trying to get people going.
In terms of output? No. Rets actually scale so poorly that a 99th-percentile Ret is somewhere around the 50th-percentile or lower of most of the meta specs.
In terms of boss mechanics? Yes. But outside of Baron Geddon, there isn’t a whole lot for the dimwitted Rogue to screw up on, and because of the DPS disparity, a dead Rogue may allow the Ret to catch up.
No one is saying otherwise, but there are measurable weaknesses to not optimizing, and in just this case, no Warlocks would be a pretty bad call to make. Curses are quite strong.
And that “flavor” was poor itemization and worse implementation. The Devs tossed the hybrids bones every now and then, especially in AQ40, but the hybrid flavor often tasted like someone crapped in it if you deviated from optimizing your play, especially when a mouth breathing Rogue only maintaining Slice and Dice and spec’d weirdly could still beat you.
The coined phrase “meme-spec” is new, but the concept is older than WoW itself. D&D has plenty of “meme” classes, so unless you have a DM that’s aware of those class weaknesses and shortcomings, it is very easy to craft a campaign that inadvertently leaves one of your players completely powerless. WoW is no different and the Devs went with theme first, balance second, and we got the debuff restrictions, flavorful immunities to poisons, diseases, and bleeds, and a total lack of meaningful scaling for many.
You have to TALENT to get 200% damage on your spell crits, and not all spells on all casters can even benefit from said talents when they exist.
You’re right, but if you’re barely beating the Tank who is otherwise mindlessly mashing Maul/Swipe, you’re being carried. There is a lot of room for error in Vanilla WoW, which promotes people to be lazy and slipshod about their raiding. The raid doesn’t die when someone goes AFK or has poor gear or messes up their rotation, but when too many of your raiders do this because “eh it won’t hurt us in the long run”, you wipe.
Well my guild runs 2 feral druids. The 3% crit buff is very nice after all. We already have MC on farm, 2 hours or less. I’m constantly getting request to tank 5-10mans, everyone is very excited when I invite them for one of my runs. The best part about having feral druids in a raid they offer a lot of flexibility. One fight all I do is decurse, so what? Innervate! Battle Rez!
Anyone who has an issue with feral druids is not very good at this game. Hell we run MC for almost zero gear drops. Like seriously there is almost nothing in there for us.
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But… BUT… you’re making fights take 3 seconds longer! How dare you!
No, seriously, thanks for reminding people it’s a video game and meant to be fun.
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Feral MT is great too.
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Casual pvp, sure, I mean who’s going to stop you BG’s are free for anyone to queue up.
Raiding less so, expect to get asked to heal or get passed up a lot if you aren’t running your own raids which I wouldn’t consider casual. DPS just isn’t there and while yes you can tank sort of there’s very few encounters where a feral tank is actually preferred.
The same is true of Warriors as most Tank fights are quite agnostic as to the Tank in front of them…
Right and since for generic and tank an spank fights warriors make better tanks there you go.
They are literally fine at raid tanking.
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Not if they make your fight take 3 seconds longer. That like… completely ruins the entire raid.
Well, that’s the word on the street.
They don’t. They have inferior threat at all stages of Vanilla and don’t approach Druid EH until well into Naxx.
LOL?
Not just fine, better, especially with the faster kills and higher DPS folks are pushing out. Bear Druid parses don’t have a line of dead Warriors near the ends of fights because they don’t lose aggro to Execute spam.
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