Druid Q&A: The Twilight Zone

It's a bit hard to explain, but we think giving up healing to dps for Shadow priests or Balance druids works. Giving up everything to heal doesn't work, maybe because the other healing specs don't have to do it.

Q u o t e:
The other hybrid's DPS speccs don't give up the ability to heal either. Given that tree's are pretty well represented, while Moonkin and Shadow Priests aren't, wouldn't it make a heck of a lot more sense to be talking about them getting healing abilities back than resto druids retaining their DPS abilities?

That’s possibly something we’d consider. I think you could make a few changes and insure that Shadow priests were about at the same healing level as say Ret or Elemental. You’d still have to decide if their healing got any better just from dropping Shadowform. If not, then there is probably no reason to ever drop Shadowform, and it should just be a passive talent not a spell. If so, then you'd have to make sure the spec wasn't too powerful over all as a backup or emergency healer, especially in PvP -- remember, we'd be talking about a Shadow priest who heals as well as Ret when in Shadowform, but better than that when not in Shadowform.

Q u o t e:
I want to understand why it's okay for an Elemental Shaman to have access to heals, but not Moonkin or Shadow Priests. These two specs get crushed in pvp. It's mind-boggling that you are talking about buffing Resto druids more by letting them dps in tree form while Balance druids are crying and begging to be addressed.

But you think Elemental shamans do fine in PvP and the reason is because they can heal? I think some players would disagree with both of those assertions. Our definition of hybrid isn’t that you can fill two roles at the same time. It’s that you can change your character to fill a different role without having to go back to first level.

Q u o t e:
Holy Paladins kind of already do this though. They have zero offensive utility/prowess, in my mind; no CC, a terrible interrupt, no mana drain, no spammable root (I'm sure you get the idea). "Shield Slam" (Warriors at least get a dispel with theirs), Judgement, and Auto Attack sure hurt! >.>

I disagree. You can say that Holy paladins are missing those things, but it’s very different when you see those buttons in your spellbook or possibly even on your bar and just can’t hit them until you change to a different form (usually costing mana) at which point they light up again.

I think the best way to explain it is that when the Shadow priest has a model to follow – there are dps casters and in this case, a class with healing capabilities is deciding to turn its back on those abilities in order to be more like those casters. You can debate the relative power and utility of say Shadow priest and warlock, but at a high level there is a lot of overlap there. Now consider the Resto druid who decides to go Tree of Life. He is becoming a new type of character – he isn’t like the other healers, because they aren’t giving up buttons (except for those already absent from their talent tree). The Resto druid is giving up buttons, and for what? To be as effective a healer as the others. (You can argue Resto druids are overpowered if you’d like, but it certainly isn’t the design that Tree of Life allows druids to be the best healer in the game).

Q u o t e:
Moonkin actually have a reason to want to spend more time in caster or feral forms, but mechanics of the class just prevent shifting out of moonkin in PvP to really be viable. Giving moonkin the ability to spend time outside of moonkin form would solve a lot of moonkin's PvP problems.

Yeah, we agree. That is what I was getting at with the druid as a shifter. The idea is that a Balance druid would sometimes leave Moonkin form, but we haven’t made it easy enough to do so. We also don’t want to just adopt a model where say you shift to caster form to decurse and shift back – that just means your decurses take 3 button clicks (or a macro). It should be more tactical than that – do I want to be in Moonkin form for a little while, or would I rather be in caster form (or possibly even bear or cat)?

Q u o t e:
We don't just give up dps or utility. We give up the ability to see our gear or to even look different from any other tree. Healing used to be in caster form, then ToL was introduced and some healing specs and situations involved being tree, but you could heal some content and pvp without ToL. Even in progression content, there were reasons to shift out. Now, we go tree and stay there. There's a 59 page thread with a vast majority of people weighing in on how this is not a fun aspect of the class. Did it occur to the OP that maybe this is some of the "sacrifice" that GC was talking about?

Yup. But honestly I think even before LK that Tree of Life wasn't situational enough -- it was just strictly a mistake to be in it nearly all the time in PvP. As I said with the Balance example above, it might work better if you decided "Okay I am going to be in Tree form for a little while because of the situation." It's a pretty different model, but imagine a druid changed forms at least once or twice a battle. That feels a little more like the shapeshifting druids from Warcraft lore.

I think the people arguing against this are of two camps: they either just love the tree and want to stay in it, or they think druids are currently overpowered and that’s either by design (to justify ToL) or that druids don’t deserve any design iteration because they are currently good.

I don't want to derail the conversation, because it's a pretty good one, but I'm going to answer two off-topic questions.

Q u o t e:
2) Can you guys speed up your design processes/thoughts a little bit? Create little "experiment servers" in house to play around with. Its incredibly frustrating to always be told "one day" or "we are looking at" or "our long term goal is" when this game isn't exactly fresh out of the box. As a thank you to all of us who have stuck around couldnt we get some faster implementation on these goals?

It's tough. We made a lot of changes in the 3.1 patch, and one of the things we heard loud and clear from a lot of players was that they couldn't keep up with such extreme class changes from patch to patch. Now, it doesn't have to be at either extreme of no changes or too many changes. But we do need to keep those in mind.

Q u o t e:
I know that there are a lot of people on the forums who only care about what class is strongest, but I'm not one of them. Cosmetics and playstyle are why I prefer certain toons, so I appreciate when Blizz pays attention to the aesthetics and fun/flavor of a class. I like to mash lots of different buttons. I like to shift. I like to change roles. I like to jump when I cast. Yeah, I'm lame like that. It's probably the ADHD in me. I was glad to see the "Is ToL Fun?" thread and the answer in the Q & A.

These role forums in particular are dominated by players for whom numerical balance is among the most important parts of the WoW experience. But they don't represent all of the WoW players, and likely not even a majority. I dwell on the numbers a lot in these forums. But that doesn't mean that's all our game design consists of. Aesthetics, cosmetics and flavor are all really important. Fun is the most important concern of all, and the only reason we obsess with the numbers so much sometimes is because that is a key component of fun for some of our most hardcore players. But theirs is not the only voice that counts.