The history of the Druid classFollow

I'd almost forgotten about this topic. Way to bring it back with more!

looks like warlocks were insanely overpowered (50% soul link??!!!)

Dear Quor,

You've been knocking my socks off since back when you where schooling us FFXI Warriors. Nice to see some things never change ^^.

Keep up the good work. Looking forward to part two.


-J

Rock on!

Update this (perhaps even make a new post) and get this damn thing stickied.
Will show exactly what we druids have had to deal with up through the years, as well as provide a valuable insight into Druids and their roles throughout time. This will help new people understand a bit better why Druids are viewed as they are today.

anyone remember the good old cookie cutter build 9/11/31 =)

Sorry i was in a hurry so my post is kinda unclear =P I meant anyone remember what were the talents for that because nearly all of them seem kinda crappy now and I couldn't remember those myself....

Are you ever going to update?

ok, ok, ok, i can explain!

college and women are a *****. no offense to any women out there, but if i hear one more "i love you, but not in that way" line outta some girls mouth, ima cut off her tongue. way to rip a guys heart out girls.

and college? two words: masters school.

all right, all right, where was i?

ah yes....

not...much. nothing really momentous here. neat little buff to cat form in the form of an innate threat reduction (removing one of our limits for cat form dps), a new rank of ferocious bite (which is nice), and some tooltip updates to correspond with the new haste descriptions, but nothing major.

all in all, it was really just a matter of waiting for a lot of druids. on the gear side of things, the easing of pvp ranking meant that more druids would see the blue and purple pvp sets, which gave a lot of druids the feral set they needed to succeed in a hybrid role, but overall everyone knew the xpac was coming, and we were all pretty sure what it would bring.

it just had to get here. we just had one more patch to go until we got there.

sadly, i cant seem to find any info on patch 1.13 on wowwiki. essentially, pach 1.13 was the "equalizer" patch for a large amount of the player base. basically, 1.13 did two major things; first, it changed the old pvp honor system into its current, token-based system, thus allowing anyone with the time to get access to high quality gear. secondly, it added the updated expansion pack talent trees to everyones ******** giving access to such goodies as mangle and force of nature.

for a brief period, feral druids were ridiculously overpowered here. mangle was just OMGWOW strong. in a solo fight, nothing could beat a druid reliably. oh, some stuff involving procs and other random stuff had a chance, if things went against the druid, but otherwise there was nothing to stop a druid from just wearing stuff down in bear form, with the odd heal sometimes added (but only if you wanted to really be insulting, cause you didnt really NEED to heal).

it was quite enjoyable really. but it was not to last.

Patch 2.0.1

this here is the first patch following the expansion pack, but before you really look at it, lets review what happened when the xpac dropped.

druids finally had come into their own. the 51-pt talents (hell, ALL the new talents) were solid and useful in their own way, and overall required minor-to-no tweaking once they were implemented. content now existed where a hybrid style of play was not only encouraged, but in many cases, needed, this giving hybrids in general a much greater chance to actually BE hybrid. finally, items were now available that catered to the needs of classes and specs of all types.

aaaand yeah. turns out im more tired than i thought i was. sorry kids! more to come soon. and by soon i mean like, soon in human time, not geologic time.

ahem. apparently its been quite awhile since old Quor waxed poetic about the history of our class. time flies when youre working and going to school full time. who knew?

anyways, where was i.....ah yes. i think i was just starting to get into the part where feral druids DESTROYED EVERYONES FACE. cause thats pretty much what happened.

seriously! it sounded quite absurd to a number of us old school druids, but it was true. hell, i did it a number of times myself. the truth of the matter was, the 2.0 patch (and the xpac) took feral druids and turned them up to eleven. the technicals of it all revolved around bear form mangle having an obscenely high coefficient of AP contribution. coupled with bear forms inherent survivability, the upgraded gearsets (designed for ferals!) and the ever-present druidic survivability, meant that a bear druid could, in most cases, 2v1 or 3v1 people of the right class.

now, playing a warrior and a druid as my main classes gives me some unique perspective on things, and i can honestly say that i really questioned the efficacy of leveling my warrior to 70 at this point in time. why would i want to waste the time on something like that when i had a better version of a warrior (of all specs) rolled up into one furry, mangling ball of awesomeness?

but it wasnt too last, and the wiser amongst our number knew this to be true. having suffered for so long under the yoke of underpoweredness, it was hard for many druids to accept the fact, but truth be told....we had to be nerfed. hitting as hard as an MS warrior, but maintaining the tankability of a prot warrior, as well as the survivability of having our own heals and CC....it was just too much. so something had to give, and that something was the power of bear mangle.

bear mangle now still hits hard, but nowhere near as hard as it did. we can no longer solo someone of any class without shifting out of bear. but, and i know i speak for all of us when i say this...

...it was DAMN fun.

more to come my children. more to come....

Edited, Nov 6th 2008 1:18am by Quor

Glad I bumped this. ;)

I need to stop checking on this thread....

Damn you Quor and your good topic!

I keep coming back here and have been holding my breath, waiting on an update.

Thank GOD Sea lion form can hold it's breath 4evah!

:)

Edited, Mar 10th 2008 8:09am by RaideroftheBlade

Thank you.

Hah, great thread. I played a Druid in beta, and from the day WoW went live. I was full Resto to level 60, because there really was no other choice, if you wanted to get in groups/raids. Healing meant spamming Healing Touch - the HOT's were just exotica. And soloing was brutally hard, and slow. When I came back for Burning Crusade, I quickly realized I could not survive in Hellfire with my old strategies, and discovered Feral for the first time. Fighting in Cat was amazing - who knew that Druids could actually have some DPS? But Feral gear destroyed my mana pool, and there was this whole new paradigm of Druid healing, with the Tree and the HOT's. For someone who played from the start, it was all pretty confusing. And now there's the Moonkins, and even Balance might be an option. Amazing! Its been quite a ride.