#0 - Oct. 18, 2006, 4:31 a.m.
Why does the act of shapeshifting cost 700 (or 1400 in BC) mana? It removes movement impairing effects? Ok, then make that a separate skill for 700 mana. Because shapeshifting is already limiting enough:
- You get a global cooldown. Yes, 1.5 seconds is a long time when everyone else can burst you for 1k damage during that time.
- You lose all your rage and energy. This is also very impacting, because you cannot do a lot of damage when you go to cat in combat and you cannot use most bear moves either. Ever tried to go bear and AoE Taunt (20 rage) to save your friends? It's horrible.
Proposed Changes:
- Make shapeshifting free.
- Add an "unsnare" ability which removes all effects and costs 350 mana (nearly twice as much as all dispell-like skills should be expensive enough).
- Rework Furor to prevent extreme powershifting (only useable once every 15 seconds eg).
This would also have the effect that feral pvp players would not be required to stack int like crazy just to shift and reduce the dps gap between druids and everyone else.
What you might think:
Well, if shapeshifting was free and you cannot be mana burned, that means you cannot be killed in a mana war anymore. Exactly. Finally the druid would have a real strength. Because currently, we lose the dps war against all classes except undergeared afk holy priests and STILL have a hard time playing the attrition game against many. If we are so extremly bad at burst damage, why are we not really good at attrition? We would still be scattershot-feared-deathcoiled-stunlocked-intercept-mortalstrike-executed as before but at least we win if they cannot pull of one of their death combos. So if you think that's overpowered, we would also gladly take Fear, Execute and Cheapshot, but I think that's way better than free shapeshifting ;)
If warriors were druids:
- Going to battle stance would not cost anything.
- Going to def or berserk stance would cost you 50 rage.
- You could not go directly from def to berserk or vice versa. You would always go over battle first.
- You would lose all excess rage over the cost of 50.
- You could pay 5 Talent points in the Arms tree on T1 to gain 10 rage again after losing all of it. A couple seconds later, anyway. Because that's still bugged, sorry.
- If you were at battlestance and wanted to taunt a mob of a healer and didn't have 50 rage, well, the healer would die. Last time I tried to bear form with less than 700 mana, it didn't work either. Learn2play, it's fine.
Last but not least:
Name me a druid ability which everyone fears. I'll go first and name 2 of each other class: Deathcoil/Fear, Mortal Strike/AE Fear, Vanish/Cheap shot/Kick, Scatter shot/18 seconds god mode/Wind clip, Bubble, Arcane Power/Pyroblast/POM/Sheep/Frost Nova, AE Fear on 30 sec CD/Mind flay, Earthshock/Frostshock/Slow Totem.
Now name me the imba druid thing. And no, Nature's Swiftness does not count, it never kills anyone, it just takes longer to lose. If shapeshifting was free, it would be "goddamit, they always have some mana left, it's just not fair". Yes, I want to see someone whine about druids, because if nobody does, the class is clearly too weak. There's always a bad player whining about any class (just read the forums regularly, you'll see it). Except Druids. Because even bad players can WTFPWN druids.
Free shapeshifting is a creative and fitting way to fix a huge problem of the Druid. Overpowered? As long as other classes get 18 seconds god mode every 2 minutes, I doubt it.
