Feral-ly Yours

Druids have had a chip on their shoulders about tanking/dps'ing since I started playing the game in '05. At that time, they couldn't do either. My first character was a druid, and feral sounded cool on paper, so that's what I went with. Oh, my naivete knew no bounds! Let me just put it this way, I couldn't get a group to help me blow my nose.

With 2.0 and BC, feral druids got a massive change and were actually viable tanks and dps. With the right gear, feral tanks are massively tough. Sure, crushing blows still suck, but they've got the hit points to take 'em. And dps of feral kitties is a beautiful thing now. Sure, they're not rogues, but they sure can dish it out.

With the changes being made in the Wrath beta, feral druids have been sweating. Until recently, they've been worried about statements made by Blizzard reps, especially omissions, when they talk about tank classes. Some have made mention of warriors, paladins, and death knights, but failed to mention druids. This made lots of people nervous. Now, Ghostcrawler has been allaying some of those concerns.

The changes made to things like armor were done mostly to solve itemization problems. We didn't make them to nerf Ferals (or anyone). We did them because we started to consider bosses who needed to drop 30 different pieces of armor (or tokens to trade for them or whatever) because classes and even specs were heading off into distinct niches. You'll get something to make up for it. No, you aren't there yet.

We're not entirely happy with the way the Feral ended up in BC. The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren't the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don't think "convenience factor" is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid. The problem was we were kind of stuck because if we made Ferals end-game tanks and amazing melee, then the rogues were screwed, because they couldn't go respec to tank or heal.

But now we have a chance to add some new talents, and we'd like for some of them to be the kind that let a druid declare that she is more of a cat or more of a bear. It doesn't have to be shoehorning two whole talent trees into one, but even offering a few choices would go a long way.

I didn't mean to sound condescending. The pot example was to offer that we haven't forgotten about bears. My point was NOT: hey, you lost armor but gee you got health stones, so why all the QQing? It was cool to see those big armor numbers on bears, and we have some plans for how to replace them (and not just with pots).

The DK gets a lot of attention because it has a lot of catching up to do. There were no DKs in UBRS or MC or TK or even Arathi Basin. Nobody knows how their abilities and power system are going to work so we feel like we have to cover a lot of the ground that was explored literally years ago for some of these other classes.

We will be really disappointed if there aren't bears main tanking Naxx and later raids, and cats that if not consistently as high as rouges, are at least a lot closer than they are now. (Source)

Hopefully this will help still the fears of my tanking brothers and sisters. After all, you shouldn't be afraid of anything if you tank with your face.

Update: It looks like feral swiftness will now be allowed indoors!

The new feral form: the Jackalope!

Camp Taurajo, just a little south of Barrens chat