TWW = An Embarrassing state for Druids

Classes Druid
1

The War Within has to be the worst state the Druid class has been in for many expansions now. I’m going to give my thoughts so far on Druid (as a player that has achieved hall of fame / world top 50 in several tiers, both as healer and DPS) and has generally played this game a LOT.

So currently, both Balance + Feral are just outrageously undertuned in general. Both needing 15%+ single target buffs to be in the mix (especially balance). Boomy specifically needs a massive rework and is just terrible to play at the moment (and 11.0.5 ain’t it - from looking over the changes in-depth I don’t see anything really changing in terms of making the spec more enjoyable, strategic, or engaging). The sad part about 11.0.5 is you look at it from a Balance Druid perspective and the only thing that really jumps out at you is Starfall no longer needing to be talented. Which is SORELY needed, might I add). Boomy will still have way too long of ramp times to achieve decent AOE damage, weak defensives, and weak single target.

Resto Druid was gutted and its healing is tuned abysmally right now and has virtually no ability to pick up health bars (and significantly lacks in recovery healing). Have you tried healing on a Shammy or Evoker vs healing on a Druid lately? The difference is monumental. I have a Druid and Shammy geared around 590 right now and going from healing on my Druid to my shammy is like going from driving a beater Honda Civic to driving a Ferrari. Chain heals and healing surges do actual healing, and if the group dips low, I can immediately top everyone with a big cloudburst, or with a Spirit Link + Ascendance combo. Resto Druid desperately needs help with emergency / recovery healing. Tranquility is absolutely terrible and is the worst healing CD in the game.

Now as for the Druid class tree… It’s an absolute unmitigated disaster… There are useless, dead filler points left and right that you’re forced into taking in order to reach other stuff that is somewhat useful. Like REJUV??? Wild growth? The Shred, Swipe, Rake, Mangle damage talent being put late in the tree just before the Improved Barkskin (oakskin) and Well-honed instincts? That is terrible, lazy design.

Druid also got by far the worst and most lackluster, boring, uninspired, underwhelming Hero talent trees in the game. No creativity or flair whatsoever.

Guardian in Dungeons right now with Elunes Chosen is the lone bright spot right now just due to how well Guardian currently does with big pulls and CD stacking + lunar beam, and Frenzied Regen not having a cooldown during Incarn. That is the extent of what Druid has going for it presently.

I honestly can’t believe what they’ve done to Druid in TWW and how horribly they’ve ran it into the ground. That’s all - just wanted to rant for a few minutes. I know you can’t fix the disaster talents + hero talents immediately, but please at least fix the tuning for Boomy / Feral / Resto before mythic week, because they all need a lot of help.

62 Likes
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I’m gonna agree on the resto front (cannot speak for dps). I have never considered swapping from druid to shaman until now. I LOVE my Druid and I won’t do it but shaman feels so much better designed right now. I can heal with Druid only because I know Druid well and have been doing it for so long but I don’t recall struggling so much in previous expansions vs other healers. Why they’d put photosynthesis and flourish on the same node I will never understand. Lost a very good and commonly used cooldown. Now we have baby trees that while they’re cute do not feel like enough throughout to actually save any situation. Designed an entire hero tree basically around treants so using convoke over ToL feels like a waste but the CD on ToL vs convoke is punishing. I just don’t feel like I have any tools at my disposal most the time and when I play shaman or Monk I always have something in my pocket. Unfortunate.

10 Likes
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Glad to know it wasn’t just me re: resto. I tried it out yesterday using the Wildstalker hero talent tree and it was atrocious. Also had a few resto healers who just seemed so much weaker than all the other healers I had - struggling to keep the group up, etc, then on my shaman and monk it seemed so easy and boring even on bigger pulls.

WIldstalker itself is also very lackluster. I can’t check now cause of maintenance, but the tooltip for the healing numbers when I was near 80 were 4 digits. Maybe they were missing a zero, but it felt very weak. I switched to keeper of the grove and it was so much better, but still felt like it fell short of the other healers I play.

I don’t really like playing the trees spec or skill, so I really hope druid and wildstalker get the help they need. Suppose it’s also possible I played wildstalker entirely wrong? :thinking:

7 Likes
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Have not had an issue healing with the other resto spec matey, wildstalker has very neat pickup with forced hots from swiftmend and rejuvenation with far worse gear than yours. You can end up with what, 8 hots on a target, nearly 30% extra healing and 20% from wildstalker forced proc.
Fast.

Try different things.

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We’ve got a balance “rework” change coming in 11.0.5, which I consider at the very least a bright spot that druids are being looked at. Hoping we see some additions to those patch notes with changes to the class tree as well as feral and resto spec trees.

I’d love for a wholesale rework of several of the hero trees as well (like dark ranger is getting) but trying to be realistic in my hopes.

2 Likes
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Long time druid lover here. Hit 80 on my boomie, got to about 489 to 490 ilvl. Leveled up a warlock (demo/diabolist) to gather on and holy crap the differences. Visuals alone, boomkins (Elune’s chosen) got a nifty flash grenade effect to fury of elune. (which doesn’t work in some dungeons, dawnbreaker.) Meanwhile, warlock summoning pit lords that laser beams, overlords that overhead smashes, and mother of chaos barrages with chaos nonsense. I’ve tried keeper of the grove, it feels like an assignment started at 11:45 pm turned in at 11:59 pm with at 12 am deadline.

14 Likes
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Playing balance Druid this season as my main as it’s been for the last 6 expansions, I’ve seen a good amount of issues for pvp.

  1. Fury of Elune feel very underwhelming. The proc chance of a fury of elune from moonfire is dreadfully low. (According to wowhead: once every 1.5 minutes)

  2. The reduction of CD to Fury is unimaginative and creates bland gameplay with weak results.

  3. Keeper of the Grove treants should be a cast at target rather than be toggled over. Shadow crash for shadow priests now allows for that.

  4. Keeper of the Grove gameplay is incredibly clunky. The concept is to add damage to our builders through dream burst. So weaving between starsurge, starfall, reapplying sunfire and casting wrath or starfire doesn’t feel fluid at all.

All in all, the new changes seem like they could be a positive. Blizzard giving starfall baseline is a nice thing but the rest of the changes seem like they are forcing all balance Druid players to play a starfall build. This is a point of debate between players who either loved the Cata starfall days where you still want that mentality of AOE everything, and the players that loved MoP days where we blasted everything with starsurges from our moonfire crits.

On the baseline Druid side, resto and balance Druid should NOT have to take instincts of the claw for 2 talent points to get Oakskin. Defense and universal druid healing NEEDS to be center tree, allowing for all druids to access them.

5 Likes
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Playing both resto shaman and resto druid, I disagree with many of your points. Druid feels good and I can usually get health bars up with a single convoke which is on a 1-min cooldown. A free 10 second tree every 3 swiftmends is also nice. The only issue I have is the class tree is indeed atrocious and needs reworked.

Boomy feels too squishy in PVP. Haven’t touched the other specs.

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Boomie is squishy and extremely clunky. Shadow priest, locks, shamans, mages, all have a clear rotation and burst rotation. In past expansions, I’ve played boomie and a warrior or dk. This expansion I am trying to figure out what to play with my arena team. I hope some more changes come before the season, and I am hoping that the changes in November address some fundamental issues with the druid tree, balance tree, and hero talents.

2 Likes
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It depends on the person’s perspective.
Since I currently play my Rdruid, I do feel it is somewhat complicated.
When it comes to wanting to provide my dps and heal like with my shammy.
I feel that my Rdruid is left far behind, since it requires more maintenance and a lot of effort to try to make the HP go up quickly.
While with the shammy it feels more relaxed and practical.
In addition, the Rdruid has great potential to do dps, but due to the issue of healing it is somewhat limited.
And the shammy can have a lot of freedom thanks to all the tools they gave them very similar to those that some healers have.
We definitely need a review, I’m not saying that we are superior, but a little support is needed to make the task of raising HP quickly less heavy.

11

Based on…what exactly?

1 Like
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I dont know much about raid dps for balance but i do know that defensive wise balance druid has the least amount of defensive kit in pve out of all the range dps specs now that hunters got a huge rework\defensive buff.

on top of that its ramp time is pretty bad for adds in fights, prob one of the slowest ramp classes in the game.

1 Like
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Based on all of the raid sims that are out (that have Boomy at the very bottom in terms of Single target and Add cleave fights), plus PTR raid testing for heroic + mythic that was done weeks ago (in tier gear) where Boomy / Feral were massively underperforming, and actual performance now from the raid yesterday (you can go through boss parses from the heroic bosses yesterday and immediately see how poorly the Druid DPS tuning currently is). Mainly for Balance Druid, but also for Feral to a slightly lesser extent.

Like on most the easier bosses on Heroic so far, you have to scroll down to page 10+ just to come across a Druid DPS - which is an immediate red flag, because it would be even worse on mythic.

Not only this, but Balance Druid has the worst defensive kit in the game right now for raid / M+. Its “defensives”, if you want to call it that, are heavily out-dated. Like we have a big defensive that requires us going into bear form and doing 0 damage.

8 Likes
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Bear Form, for Balance Druids, to me should feel like almost a last resort button— comparable to Mage Ice Block or Paladin Divine Shield. Something you press to survive insane damage, or when you’ve exhausted all other defensive options.

The problem is that for Balance, the only defensive options available to us are Barkskin which is a 1-minute CD and only 20% (or 30% with Oakskin) damage reduction— or simply flat healing (including Well-Honed Instincts and Frenzied Regen here). Healing damage up rather than having actual mitigation can be exhausting when you’re also trying to perform your DPS rotation, and your health bar is ping ponging up and down. The only reprieve we have is Barkskin and Bear Form. Moonkin Form’s armor increase is so pitifully unnoticeable it might as well not even exist.

Renewal is nice and heals for an adequate amount, but Regrowth healing is so bad it’s despicable. Getting a Regrowth crit actually feels pretty good, but crit is not a stat Balance really goes for. So, you end up spamming Regrowth like 8 times to recover. It’s way better to just go into Bear Form and use Frenzied Regeneration though, or just click Renewal if it’s off CD if you need a big chunk of healing.

Regrowth’s low healing though feels especially bad because Balance Druid off-healing suffers due to how weak it is. If you compare Balance Druid to a Ret Paladin’s kit, it always feels amazing to use a Word of Glory/Eternal Flame, or Blessing of Sacrifice on a party member.

Don’t even get me started on how we are forced to talent into Rejuvenation with how useless that spell feels to press on Balance.

We could take Heart of the Wild to off-heal better, but why should we need a spell that has a whole 5-minute cooldown just to make our Regrowth heal for more than ~10% of an HP bar?

Sorry for the long rant reply. It’s just really frustrating when I play my Paladin and my Mage with how much more defensive they feel in comparison to my Boomy. The number of tools at their disposal is leagues ahead of Balance. It really is starting to feel like Balance Druid is stuck in in some time loop of archaic class design.

8 Likes
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Indeed it is. No other spec needs 5-6 GCDs to ramp up only to start to ATTEMPT at a burst window. No other spec needs to nullify its damage output for a recovery that is completely botched, and on top of that nullified by MS effects and dampening in arena. We 100% need some help in the survivability department, and our core mechanics are still hindering and unfun. We’re still powerful and can be fun to pull off shenanigans on, sure, but nowhere near ideally designed or feeling wholesome to play.

8 Likes
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Firstly, this spec does struggle heavily with issues of having too prolonged of ramp up times (even for higher keys), it gets to the point of being ridiculous.

I would just make Orbital strike apply ALL of our dots, not just stellar flare. And i would give us a short cooldown ability like Aff warlocks’ Vile Taint that can apply all of our dots. They literally have Seed of corruption that puts Corruption on everything, and Vile taint which applies agony to everything.

Right now our dots take way too long to apply to large groups of mobs for how weak they are. If you want to keep them weak, give us better ways of applying them.

I would also like to see Warrior of Elune just made baseline and have something else added in its place that augments Starfire in a different way. This spec just feels way too terrible to play without WoE in dungeons, and you then have to give up treants.

5 Likes
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This is magic. This is wonderful. Allows for much more fluid game play and an easier way to enter into solar eclipse. If baseline, for give and take reasons, even make it so it only allows for 2 instant starfire casts to get into solar eclipse. Didn’t they add this talent in when you had to cast 3 spells to enter into eclipse?

For defense, make the damage reduction of oakskin baseline, or move it to the center of the Druid tree.

1 Like
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How many people play at 99% of their sims? Why is it we can see Ferals at the bottom of “tier/dps” rankings, and yet see Ferals at the top of their raids performances.

Sims and charts are assuming ALL THINGS EQUAL. Which none of it ever is. Druids could be 15% behind the #1 ranked dps spec on sims and still beat that class in their own raid setting.

This whole “need buffed to compete” thing is all nonsense said by people who do not understand how sims and rankings work

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Maybe I haven’t try anything beyond LFR and heroic dungeon on my feral druid yet but as ilvl 581 feral I feel I am doing OK. I can’t do as much brust damage as my ret pally (ilvl 589 ior 588 now) but I feel my damamge isn’t that bad. I usually top damamge or 2nd in heroic dungeons.

The only thing I feel is that as a feral I feel very squishy but that’s always the case and the low energy regen does make the spec slow. I play druid of the claw and it feels really terrible when Ravage proc and

  1. You have no erengy
  2. The pack is about to die and you have omem proc, usuing it will waste it but it you don’t use it then it might go away next pack.
  3. Still too much for a RNG base sometimes it prcos when you don’t need it or it never proc so your damamge is low.

Primal Warth NEEDS to longer is duration increase and the whole Primal Warth at 5cp and then Ferocious Bite with Rampant Ferocity for AoE is clunky to play and needs to much for a ramp up time. Since energy rengen is really low it feels bad when you don’t have omem proc.

So my damamge can be as low as 200k up to 1m+ dps average around 650 to 700k while my ret paly can cosntaly reach 900k to 1m and even higher with CD on AoE packs every 30sec or so.

2 Likes
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While I wouldn’t complain about a longer primal wrath duration, I think the main issue is how low our crit is. Once we start getting 50%+ crit, we’ll be able to fit more bite/ravage in between reapplications of primal wrath.

1 Like