by Rebella

I wasn’t really going to write anything about these previews, simply because what I’ve seen so far seems reasonable and the characters I play have had a couple of things I’ve been excited about and not really anything I’m particularly disappointed. The plan was to add an overall view towards the end of my healing series. Then they added the druid preview, the one I care the most about…

When changes have been made to the game I’ve never felt strongly about them. However, when I read the preview about a few minutes ago it felt like a slap in the face. I double checked the date and no it’s not April first any more, so they must be serious:

Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

My druid is a tree, and she takes pride in being a tree. Being a tree is simply part of Rebella’s identity. It’s great to be unique (as unique you can be with 3 other trees surrounding you). There was never any doubt which druid was the healer. The idea of boosting my own healing could be nice, but not by making me heal in caster form most of the time. Surely there has got to be another way of giving us a similar boost. In all honestly if I could choose I’d rather not have to rely on a cooldown that would make such a difference as that one implies. Consistency is one of the druids strengths as I see it anyway, oh well.

Yeah, OK, it would be nice to have HoTs benefit from haste and crit without any fancy glyphs or set bonuses, but this is something that they will add to all classes by the looks of it and will affect DoTs as well. I know this will be a great boost to our healing, but that was pretty much all they decided to give us and it’s not even something special.

If you want to show off your nice armour you can hang around the bank in caster form or reroll. A druid in WoW is all about its shapeshifting. If they increase healing while out of caster form then why not increase caster dps out of form? It seems they have just decided on one of the specs and deforestation seemed the best way to go. I’m sure some will like the change and other will be indifferent and that there are plenty of blog posts out there to analyse the announced changes sensibly and even rationally .

Just to top it off we’re not even getting any new spells because we already have a lot to choose from. As if priests haven’t got even more spells, and even they are getting new toys… Sigh

I hope they get enough feedback from other people disappointed with the change so they will change their minds and leave us alone. If tree form goes, so do I. It is not looking very good:

We knew changing Tree of Life to a cooldown was going to be controversial. There was just no way a change this big would be unanimously accepted. My apologies if being a tree was what really drew you to the class.

Or maybe there is hope after all

We might (*might*) consider a minor glyph that kept the visual of the old tree form in some fashion even when not using the Tree of Life cooldown.

If they add that then that might be what it takes to make me happy.

- – - – - – - – -

If you want to see all the announced druid changes, have a look on the official forums

Tags: cataclysm, druid, healing

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 09:52 and is filed under changes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.