DRUID in Burning Crusade Classic: Is It Any Better Now?

[Music] hello ladies and gentlemen willie here with tbc confirmed it's about time we did a little bit of a class update let's take a look back at each class in the burning crusade the performance overall and hopefully help you make your choice moving forwards we will be looking at what's new in terms of talents and abilities leveling pve who's the new king of the meter pvp has much changed and tier sets which actually exist for every specialization now and through this i hope to answer is your class any better now burst through the portal the hottest healer on the market the most mobile class in the game and the tank that puts the word thick into dick the druid well we have to begin this somewhere and i'm going for the druid why druid i think out of every class if i had to give some kind of most improved award out it's going to go to our furry friends the love this class got from blizzard moving from classic to the burning crusade is nothing short of enormous no longer are you prevented from using your hearts because of world boss no longer are you in the shadow of warriors as a tank no longer are the dps specs totally memed on both bringing very valuable assets to your raid team i think i want to start by going over a few things when i looked at the druid back generally wasn't any good though videos being that drugs are the true embodiment of a jack-of-all-trade master of none but oftentimes better than a master of one um well and wow unfortunately this doesn't really tend to be the case being specifically proficient in one role is more valuable the vast majority of the time this is why you have raid groups or arena teams it's an mmo and it's often a group wide effort that flexibility your class boasts can really rarely be flexed aside from class specific utility of course your resto druid in classic wasn't about to hop into cats and do anything meaningful nor do any damage due to stacking bonus healing your boomkin shifting into bird to torn is missing the huge bonus burst get from armour scaling as you're probably wearing a lot of cloth gear the hybrid tanks was hitting your vault of utility a little bit too hard this was the idea that azure class could perform in multiple roles that it could not be as strong as a class that could only do one as it would risk only one class being viable for that role which definitely didn't happen in classic at all so in tbc whilst keeping much of their own unique utility druid toolkit expanded greatly and each of their specializations started to shine on their own not suffer as a result of the overall class identity okay with that in mind let's get into this so what is new for druid a lot like a really huge amount i'll go over what's new baseline then we can get into the spec specific stuff when we cover that soon or i'll just end up repeating myself baseline druid's got some spells which have become iconic with the class over the years cyclone an extremely versatile and powerful tool which we can talk more about mostly for pvp lacerate for bears a stacking bleed with a threat modifier kind of like the feral equivalent to sunder armor in that it's stacked to five whilst doing minor damage it's just another button to press makes your rotation a bit more interesting main for catch this new finishing move uses your combo points for an incapacitate effect unlike gouge from rogues though it doesn't break from damage over time only direct damage so it can be a strong setup ability for a cc chain or a follow-up cyclone druids got flying of course they can train flying for cheap at their class trainers as early as level 68 making them the ideal candidates for gabras in the open world and kind of impossible to take out in pvp unless you can stun lock them down in a later patch the epic flying variant was introduced through a long quest line this wasn't three though and you had to pay up the 5k for master flying before you could make a start on it but it was well worth it giving some nice idols access to anzo and sethik halls who can drop the raven lord and an instinct cast 280 percent flying speed very good and for restoration life bloom a hot that can be stacked up to three times in tbc and when it's expired or is dispelled it gives a strong instant burst of healing great for targets taking consistent damage like tanks and offers dispel protection for other hearts in pvp leveling wise i'll keep it pretty short because there is a lot to talk about for the rest of the video what made druids good and classic for levelling continues to make them good in tbc too ferro will still be your go-to and whilst moonkin does get a lot of help from the talent reworks a lot of those talents are reliant on item scaling at endgame and there's a fresh 60 or especially before that you just aren't going to be seeing the benefits of them nearly as much as a geared 60 resto druid though it'll be boom your bus really well outside of dungeons that is there is some hybrid pvp spec called restokin i'll talk about later which could be interesting for this actually despite getting flying early as well outland wasn't by and large designed with the notion that you will be flying as we've seen with previous retail expansions sure it can help with some verticality at times but the game doesn't expect you to have flying until level 70. it's just a little bit of a druid bonus so let's talk pve and we'll get a bit more into these specializations as with every druid video there are four specs so i'll do my best to cover everything let's start with the one i bet most people are curious about how it's changed boomkin so in classic boomi suffer from just about everything that can go wrong with a caster class they have poor mana management though hit talents reliant on crit rng to do damage they can't use their dots because of the debuff cap which is now 40 in tbc they compete with other casters for best gear they don't have a dedicated tier set and well the damage just isn't very good even if the stars align quite literally and you get very lucky so you'll be glad to know the vast majority of this changes will you be top of the meters will people be saying we need more boomkins for this raid will you be getting funneled all the top looters a priority no whilst the spec is massively improved it's still more utility focused and middle of the road in damage spec wise bark skin gets a very nice little rework to make it considerably better now 20 of all damage taken is reduced the attack speed slow from classic is gone and it's usable whilst cc'd or let on a one minute cooldown one of the main reasons droods are so good in pvp insect swarms move over from the resto tree to balance so they can actually cast it now this also reduces their target's chance to hit by two percent here's an idea of what a pve raid focus build will look like a lot of talents have been consolidated starlight rafter casting speed celestial focus for more pvp utility balance of power is a nice hit chance talent which the druids very much needed dream state lunar guidance and moon glow are all there to address scaling issues that the boonkin had in classic though these can still crop up early on into the expansion improved furry fire if you thought melee started ring when they didn't see a fairy fire up in classic for seconds well let's turn it up to 11 with this talent now providing a three percent ranged and melee hit chance on it which is an extremely powerful debuff your whole brake can benefit from you will definitely want to have this moonkin phone got big buffs hundred percent armor which is now on beefy chicken boy the critter are buffed up from three to five percent and for some reason you now get attack power and a chance to restore mana on melee which um i guess someone at blizzard liked the idea you go home and then just start smacking people about with your tender arms i don't know horse of nature not taken though well see blizzard have this habit of giving moonkins spells that are hard to control do you remember the early versions of starfall and force and nature just kind of go and do their own thing there isn't a pet bar for them so there could be a risk to champal or just cause general headaches maybe there will be some big brain who figures out how to get them to work through macros which did happen with totems in classic for a while so you can see here why boomi is a great class to bring on top of innovate rebirth are feels they now have a better spell crit aura they reduce enemies chance to hit and provide melee hit themselves the thing is and this will be the case with quite a few specs you don't really need to bring more than one of them to get all the good stuff they bring utility spec right and there are quite a few we need one of these type specs in the game now i can say the demand for laser chickens in your raid will definitely be there though in tbc moving on though feral dps the talent tree that packs enough points and punch to get two specializations out of it how are the kitty cats are looking over the other side of the dark portal well similar to classic in some ways a specialization that needs a bit of extra effort to get the most out of it remember wolf's head helm and power shifting yep that is still a thing the real simple explanation of this item combined with a fiora talent an exit and re-entering platform between energy ticks is superior to just letting your energy regenerate naturally at the expense of being a lot more mana intensive and requiring you to get that rhythm down what about manual crowd pummeller though well good news there at least the on-use change to 500 haste rating in tbc there is new toys that farrell's get so this goes for tanks to exceed what this weapon can offer so ferals rejoice your days of gnomeregan are officially over here is an example dps spec i've left talent points out from improved mark of the wild both your boomies and resto druid will always have this talented so you should be able to get out of the buff rotation as for where you can put these points it's up to you really more chance to resist fears or stuns better off heels more cc whatever you want really non-effect dps just your utility as for the talents here it's kind of like moonkin a lot of consolidation and streamlining to combine a cat and bear talents together leader of the pack is five percent melee crit now with a little healing for your group on the improved version part of the wild rework to give more ap and cat instead of strength and mangle there is a version of this for cat and for bear think of the cat version as your new replacement for claw it's just a straight up upgrade in every sense on top of increasing the damage the target takes from bleeds and shred by 30 it's more of just a maintain buff in pve though if you have a feral tank they should be doing this role for you and you'd only really use it if you can't get behind the target to shred solid dps if you put in the extra effort bring that druid utility to show and a nice extra bit of crit for your group that's feral dps which only makes sense to talk tank next here's a look at the talents very similar to cat you will see only a few points moved into key rage generation or threat generation talents like vowel instinct their kind and intensity the burr version of mangle is the same debuff as feral but it's on a short cooldown and it hits like a truck believe me when i say if bears were the underdog tank in classic in tbc they are the alphas this spec is totally insane this bonus armor goes up to 400 percent now you get 25 more stamina from items on top of heart of the wild that's 45 extra stand from items alone in bear no tank scales like a feral tank does they are a wall of health and armor oh and they're actually extremely agile druids started to literally become near untouchable by bosses as their dodge chance was in the high 80s or 90 percent even in lesser gear they become crazy powerful very early on druid tanks scaled so well blizzard had to put an aura in the sunwell so the bosses stood a chance at hitting them back if that doesn't convince you about this spec then i don't know what else to say and that's even if a hit gets through you're then hitting the highest health pool and the most armor on the downside ferals don't really pack the cooldowns other tanks have at all if something goes wrong you're praying to rng for dodges or that your healers can back you up either way though expect a big surge in the number of druid tanks you see in tbc which leaves us with a restoration what i can think safely makes up the vast majority of the druid player base at the moment now two very important things change in tbc for resto druids that make such a huge difference to your playstyle first of all heal over times are no longer exclusive buffs so two droids can have two rejuvenations running on the same target secondly with the world buff meta and consumable stacking nerfed you can actually cast your heals over times without having your tanks raging at you that they're gonna lose their only buff or something as far as i know the player buff cap of 32 is still there but you're really gonna have to try and go out of your way to hit that number so here are some example talent trees now you might have noticed for this one i've just chucked points into everything that does something to your heels and yeah you're right strictly for pve there isn't really much we care about any other talent trees at all we have seven points left here where you can just put them wherever you want to really you can put them into bounce you can do a bit more dps you do get one third of your healing as spell damage in tbc by the way go for extra talents and restoration but there's nothing too interesting in the feral tree as for what's new for restoration and not that much it's just your play style that actually allows you to well play your class to its full potential gift of the wild gets an icon that's pretty exciting i guess the big deal here is that similar to every other druid spec now as you no longer get a chance to look at your tier gear and character model progression instead you get to look at a tree so tree is actually super powerful your heels on party members is increased by 25 of your total spirit mana costs reduce by 20 percent downside is you can only cast restoration stuff and your movement speed is reduced by 20 trees don't run very fast after all alternatively just go full-on pretend as though healing touch doesn't exist anymore and purely heal through your hearts bringing a fully upgraded thorns and have more talents in the bounce tree ignoring healing touch frees up 12 points to be spent elsewhere and it lets other healers play whack-a-mole with the meters while just covering the raid in hops and dropping tree to add some dps whenever you can if you're resto now and you love it well good news it continues to be a strong choice which means it's time to talk about pvp now for this part we're gonna largely be focusing on the arena i feel that's the area of the game that most players will care about but i'll give some brief mention to the other areas too the short version is feral and moonkin are both quite underrepresented in arena in all brackets apart from twos as those specializations being played and geared purely for themselves instead of a support tree for restoration barrel is somewhat lacking in a damage department until late game gear is available though you could say much of the same for any melee class really it has a narrow range of comps which it's regularly played in most commonly seen in feral rogue in twos they are forced into a choice too often of having to sit in bear to stand up to rogues or warriors or constantly spam shifting to stay on casters since they have no built-in slow baseline whilst by no means being a total write-off of a spec you're really going to have to work hard to hit the higher rankings whilst in open mode or battleground it's quite the opposite story flight 4 makes druids just in general incredibly obnoxious in the open world it takes to outnumber a druid to beat them really battleground wise what makes them good in classic is still there depends how much you still like carrying flags i guess also free action potions become undispellable in a later tbc patch as for moonkins they just struggle to do enough damage through their non-instant spells to provide a considerable threat and they're very crit reliant to put out damage which resilience actively cuts down in power exponentially as the expansion progresses like feral they find it hard to actually play their class when putting arenas against some tougher opponents again it'll be a tall order to hit high ratings as a boomi restoration though resto is a different story pretty much everything goes right for resto in tbc arena i'll bring up a spec and tell you why so this is something along the line of what you'll be seeing for deep restoration in arena along the line of its strengths nearly everything you do is instant cast meaning you stay mobile all the time moving around pillars interrupts are rarely an issue for you you're the hardest healer to lock down by an absolute mile with travel form you can literally over quadruple your armor if melees ever start to train you just by pressing birth form whilst your hearts heal you back up predicting swaps and getting into a bear is a sign of a strong druid dark skin can cover mistakes like a mini pain suppression your spells get a 30 reduced chance to be dispelled through the subtlety talent this goes for offense and defensive spells and yes this works on entangling roots versus no escape artist by the way you have two emergency heel instant cast buttons with swift men and nature's swiftness and this can also be used to hibernate enemy druids for an instant clone or even a roots in a pinch you have cyclone which renders the target immune and pauses all healing on them you can also cyclone big cooldowns just to disrupt the enemy players you have an interrupting feral charge your pvp gloves reduce the casting time of cyclone tauren have war stomp into cyclone elves can shadow meld and drink you can shift into form to avoid mana drains whilst inform your immune to sap and polymorph basically druids have a lot going right for them there is also a restokin build i mentioned early on here it is the idea behind it is instead of hopping into birther defense why not just use moonkin form instead and do some more damage remember you get one third of your spell damage from healing gear in tvc so a resto gear druid hopping into bear is just purely for defense you're really not going to be doing any damage other than using it for bash or frenzied rejuvenation maybe a demoralizing raw moonkin offers some offense on top of this and that's what the build is it sacrifices some strong restoration talents like mend and natural perfection to get better mana efficiency and overall damage through talents like moon glow lunar guidance and dream state despite having more points and balance you will still be gearing purely for resto more or less don't let it fool you it's just droods are so good they can get away with doing this it's a bit like having fury prop and classic at the moment so that's pvp overall you will see the vast majority of druids opting to heal sort of like classic but they'll be much stronger resto should be a serious consideration for any arena junkie and is seen at the top levels of play in all arena brackets and fits into a wide variety of different comps usually seen with warriors locks mages rogues hunters basically anything you want to play with it to be honest which leaves us with tier gear so this will be mainly pve stuff because the pvp tier up to season four were just pve recolors and their set bonuses were always the same it's just some resilience and some kind of ability modifier as well as the glove bonus of course which i will cover in the pvp section where it's notable just for the sake of time the good news for tier sets in tbc is that each specialization gets one whilst they won't always be your best in slot tbc definitely has some great looking sets which may be kind of lost on druids as you're looking at your form but um it's better than only having one for restoration right each tier is earned through tokens just like how it is with next ramos gear has five pieces overall and have a two and a four set bonus apart from tier six which has boots belts and wrists added in the sunwell there's no additional set bonuses though there are also dungeon sets but i'll try and only bring them up when they're really relevant tier 4 is the milan set from karazhan and magthon and gruel's lair so for the feral sets and this goes for tpc gear in general they have a bunch of extra armor on them more so than your average leather items once again reinforcing how good burrs are the two set is some more resources very solid the force that is exceptionally good for birds expect this tier to be funneled to the ferals early the cat dps variant is pretty negligible resto it's more mana and shorter cooldown on nature's swiftness that's okay not too much to add there balance more mana efficiency they do struggle with mana early on in tbc depends how long fights are as for how relevant this ends up being tier 5 nordrassil from serpent shrine cabin and tempest keep i don't know if i like this set more or tier 6 probably this one the two set for ferrell is uh it's not bad it's just more of a solo play or maybe i could see in pvp as well it's only sacrificing two resilient slots so maybe there's something there all set is more damage on your main abilities okay cool restoration more regrowth duration and bigger life bloom pops the thing is you don't really tend to use regrowth because it's super mana intensive and you want to keep life bloom rolling at three stacks normally so i'll show how good this is balance the mana reduction on regrowth here is actually significant it's about seventy percent of the spell cost to like the feral set for this tier but more of a solo play pvp option once again 10 star fire damage is very nice actually you're always at least going to have insect swarm rolling so not that bad at all tier 6 from black temple mount hyjal and the boots belt and wrists are from sunwell the two set for feral you're pressing shred as a cat you're almost for certain gonna have a feral tank applying mangle unless you can't get behind the target i suppose more threat for birdo you'll have to see it some extra damage from the four set just not really on the most impactful abilities restoration smaller cooldown on swift mend hopefully you shouldn't be needing this button on cooldown but some more bosses do hit like trucks so it might be solid and more healing touch bonus on the full faucet we saw a talent build for bresto that pretends healing touch doesn't exist well outside of nature's swiftness so i'm guessing this one isn't too exciting finally balance more duration on moonfire which should stack up nicely with the towns to improve this ability and extra crit on starfire and bounce is all about crits so looks decent so druid is it any better now well i kind of gave it away like five seconds after the intro but yes they are considerably better than they ever were in classic in every single role whilst not coming into the stride as a top tier dps class just yet your raid leader has a much more compelling set of reasons to want all of those specializations around in their raid bear tanks are what warriors are to classic just overall extremely good they struggle a little on aoe not gonna lie but as an off tank they're gonna do the most damage by far and their single target threat and survivability are top tier resto still has its spot in pve and becomes arguably the best pvp healer in the game for arena content i'd expect to see a much wider variety of droods in tbc and for their place in the game to amount to much more than a furry firebot and a flag carrier i hope i did you druids justice here please do let me know if there is anything important that you would have added below these videos are always an incredible amount of information to cover and condense but i want to do the best job i can providing a fair and honest overview to give you a reasonable expectation of the class moving forwards i'll try and add a polar later on down the line so you guys can say what you'd like to see next anyways thank you all so much for watching and listening in and i'll see you in the next one very [Music] soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: WillE

Views: 277,235

Rating: 4.9469714 out of 5

Keywords: the burning crusade, tbc, tbc beta, WoW Classic tbc, World of Warcraft, druid

Id: iR1_6l4E0TQ

Length: 22min 26sec (1346 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Esarus]

Short answer: Yes

[u/GuardYourPrivates]

The deep dive is deep. I hope he gives priests this much thought.

[u/Seranta]

Lots of good info in the video, but I'd like to say that the talent trees you showed for feral should be different. Cats use Rip and not ferocious bite unless the stars really align, meaning that putting points into feral aggression isn't worth picking, you rather want a stronger bear form if you were to ever need to enter bear form. You will end up running something like this:

https://legacyplayers.com/Tools/Talents/#xZxhGsfroezioVxIz

For both cat and bear. As bear you can't expect to tank 100% of the time so having savage fury is great for that as well.

In general a great video though.

[u/hansjc]

I've been waiting since day 1 of classic

[u/kazuyermagicc]

I love willie's viddeosss