Linguine wrote: ↑6 years ago
Raid Healing: In Alliance raids, druids, even good druids, can have such difficulty placing on the healing meters that uninformed guild leadership will sometimes try to kick them from the guild. I actually prevented this from happening once in my own guild (...)
You must have played in a very competitive guild if your guild lead wanted to kick druids for not placing themselves (high enough) on heal meters. I would never join a guild that treats people like that.
5-Man Healing: If I was going to take a healer to a 5-man, Druid ranks last on my desirability list. Paladins and Priests won't do much DPS if they come as DPS to lend us a rez, but perhaps on Horde Druids can make better healer than Shaman and the Shaman can add a nice boost to melee DPS with WF totem? Please clarify, I'm not certain what you guys do.
A druid healer would probably be my least favourite choice for 5 mans as well and playing a (hybrid) druid I would rather tank or play the wildcard (off-dps, off-tank, off-heal), but it's definitely doable, especially if the group doesn't suck and / or if there's a shadow priest, dps shaman or ret paladin as well - I mean, we are talking about 5 mans after all, not Naxxramas, right? *wink*
Five Man Tanking: We have a differing opinion on the importance of five man tanks, but on the Alliance Paladins can tank the Undead Level 60 dungeons so that may factor in here. Either way, being unable to eventually main tank and having no tier set dedicated to tanking either leads this to be a rough road.
Paladins also make decent 5 man tanks, especially in Strat and Scholo like you said, but druids may be the strongest 5 man tanks overall, because of their excellent threat generation and preraid tanking gear, which lasts well into MC and 20 man content.
It's true that druids don't have a tanking tier set and around BWL the gap towards warrior tanks is probably the worst, but they catch up again once AQ gear becomes available.
Powershifting: Powershifting takes a very big time commitment to gear up each week and if one is powershifting it is assumed that you could likewise be fully decked with consumes as another class and actually appreciated for it. It takes a strong will to ignore the fact that all your effort didn't put you at the top like you could as another class. Hopefully these Druids are doing it to get Feral gear for PvP and not simply to raid.
I'm not interested in playing as a pure feral let alone damage dealer druid, which I agree takes a lot of effort to be viable, but if someone is willing to invest that much and switch roles according to the required situation, either being a tank or a damage dealer - why not?
Flag Running: As far as flag running goes, not only do they have Frost Mages to compete against (as usual) but also Paladins and instead of being tied for 1st they get knocked down to 2nd or 3rd because they are countered so hard by Warlocks, and Horde tends to have a lot of those.
I'd wager that druids are still unmatched as flag carriers thanks to their high mobility, anti-snare, anti-polymorph and high survivability in general.
Stuns and fears are a major nuisance, but which class is better suited to deal with it as a FC?
Solo PvP vs. Group PvP: Druids are a good class for prowling solo in wPvP picking and choosing battles with stealth, I will concede that, but in BGs or any group PvP, I always instruct my allies to kill them last because they can't save an ally in time with their slow heals, do enough dps in time to hurt one of my allies, or interrupt a heal in time to hinder me. Their presence as a threat is lackluster compared to just about every other class's toolkit (though if I played Horde I may not care much about killing Ret Pallies first either, hard to say). Notably, they're both solo classes that only have a big advantage when playing alone. For some players, this is ideal. They love feeling that they did it all themselves, but unless someone is certain they feel this way I wouldn't recommend the class to them.
I agree that druids aren't exactly the biggest threat in PvP, even though with the right (hybrid) gear (Feralheart, Genesis, PvP sets) and increased damage output they become quite dangerous.
Regardless, if played according to their strengths druids are a viable PvP class - as FC in WSG, as base defender in AB or as someone who picks his fights and / or simply outlasts his opponents / survives in AV or world PvP.
As Selexin wrote, druids may not excel in any role, but it's still a long stretch from not being perfect to "being weak".
