diagree man omem druid (bala tree talent) make u perfect healer as feral for low lvl content just autoattack and u have free spells deadmines i heal with omen without spending mana just dont use reneve outside proc and everything is ok.for my experience better to invest in omen early it make u rl well fit for all situations later u can consider respec for more attackpower but u lost all ur potensial as healer if u have alchemy mana pots can make u healer in feral even on mauredon.Only oomkin is weak because oom but if a little effort is good for soloing.For druid from my experience on pvp classic prio survi over damage and u are good.Also about barkskin is more skillfull skill u have aggro look for hit jump away pop it up and back into bear it can be macro.For begginer resto i recoment moonglow spec (mid bala).
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that, for survivability, shifting removes roots/snares/slows, that saved me more than once when trying to run away as cat and switching to travel or bear to break out of a net or shake off a frostbolt
One note I would add: spending ur ealry skillpoints into Feral so you can get 2/2 Feral Swiftness at lvl 21 is a decent strategy. The 30% movespeed increase will be a huge timesaver until lvl 30 where you unlock travel form
@@patrickmangels9171 Absolutely, R4 is the bread and butter, R3 if you need to snipe it a little faster, R7 if there is big damage coming in that needs to be healed hard (good with Wushoolay's Charm of Nature), Max Rank for Nature's Swiftness (or niche situations with Wushoolay's). if you're fiendish and fighting for the snipes against the priests and paladins and can afford the mana inefficiency you can even sneak a R2 in there once in a blue moon. I wouldn't recommend it though ;)
@@patrickmangels9171 The panic heal. Damn, you make me miss TBC durid healing, when Swiftmend was a thing and innervating mages made you friends because own mp5 was more than enough.
A big secret to leveling druid is not to get too attached to offensive stats like Strength and Agility. The other stats, Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit are all very valuable, including for feral leveling speed. But for utility, survivability, QOL, and fun, they are absolutely game changing. Another secret is don't be put off by the cast time penalty on barkskin. You ignore one spell pushback and barkskin has already paid for itself. When you overpull mobs, there's absolutely no need to panic. Just Barkskin and freecast healing touch. If you have a large health pool (see my first tip above), you can do some pretty crazy stuff, bridging the gap to a 2nd barkskin if you're still in a bad situation. One final tip is moonkin form is just terrible. Level balance if you want, but just don't use Moonkin Form. You can spec it, but just don't use it unless you're in a dungeon group or something. "Caster Form" costs 0 mana. Shapeshifting is VERY expensive while you're leveling, so its not trivial at all to now start paying full price to shift to what you treat as your caster form. You're going to use travel form, and your mount. You might even use cat form for stealth and bear form for bash sometimes. If you're going back into moonkin form after each of these, youre wasting like 1/4 of your mana and 1.5 second global cooldown EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. You can also level resto and for a while it's actually not too much slower than feral. But eventually it slows way down and mobs that are immune to bleeds start to feel like raid bosses. Still, NS is pretty fun, and also in dungeons having a 0-threat tranquility is pretty badass, even if you're dpsing or tanking.
Worth noting that spirit is quite valuable on feral too, a few 'of the wolf' pieces helps ensure that your mana bar can refill while fighting in in cat form
A few macros I made for my druid are: 1) Dismount, stand up, start attacking and cast Feral Faerie fire. You always are going to do that first unless you're stealthed, so there's little point in adding a /startattack macro to anything else. 2-4)Dismount, stand up, and cancel whatever form you're in and then go into Bear/Cat/Travel Form (3 separate ones). The Bear one is useful for tanking before a pull to activate Furor, the Cat one can be used for powershifting, and the travel form one is sometimes helpful to get going immediately, and all are useful for removing snares and roots. Adding dismount and stand was something I did after being annoyed that it didn't happen automatically and said "you are mounted" or "you must be standing up".
Healing at end game is very fun, when you understand how to do it. Precast->cancel/cast, repeat. It's no priest or shammy sort of healing, but it has its own mental minigame of predicting all damage caused in a fight. It's more fun than priest healing imo, because it's predictive with druids over being reactive as with priests or any other healer class. You know you have good druid healers in a raid when clutch saves are made by precision HT's that makes the druids seem psychic in terms of predicting the future. Dudu heels is the last vanguard, at least when they know what to do.
@@gandalf8216 You're absolutely right about it being predictive, there is no better feeling healing in Classic than being the best person at sniping heals in the your raids against very good Paladins and Priests as a Druid with the slowest cast times of all the classes (Healing Touch). It's not just that it makes you seem psychic, you do sort of develop an instinctual understanding of when damage is going to come in and who it'll go on despite crit randomness and potential threat funkiness, at least in my case. The only issue in Classic was the batching sometimes would troll you by delaying your spell from actually landing when you'd correctly predicted it, though thankfully that's gone now. Being very mana efficient is also a nice touch (R4 Healing Touch's efficiency and Innervate is a nice combo, add Moonglow for even more, optimising Mana Pot and Dark Rune usage around Innervate and mana usage rates depending on the boss was also an interesting minigame to engage with while healing). Not to mention Wushoolay's Charm of Nature, the ZG Mojo Trinket, is one of the most fun and potent trinkets in Classic, definitely the most satisfying of the healing trinkets. Getting 40% cast time reduction on your Healing Touch during periods of massive damage feels amazing, just blasting out max rank Healing Touch on the tank and melee on Princess Huhuran, overtaking the other healers by a landslide.
If you are watching this and making a Druid. Your first 5 talent points need to go into improved demo roar. Can’t believe OP didn’t talk about this. It’s the most slept on talent and it’s absolutely insane how much it lowers enemies attack power. AOE debuff that makes tanking stupid easy. Had healers that said they were bored in dungeons lol drastically increases your survival ability
Feral druid is great for gathering too, also a blast to level. One of my favorite classes for pvp too with the shapeshifting removing snares and being immune to being sheeped.
Omen of Clarity is awesome for healing leveling-dungeons. You can reduce downtimes dramatically by hitting stuff in melee while in caster-form and then spend the proccs on the otherwise extremely expensive max-rank-regrowth. But be careful in HC not to stand in the range of stuff with AoE-silence or shield-bash/kick.
This is a instant health pot use and back into form macro /cancelform /use Lesser Healing Potion /use Bear Form Just change bear or cat...or whatever potion you want to use instantly.
^ above dude is correct - I don’t shift back in immediately either as I take the opp to pop a rejuv (and natures grasp if necessary) - gotta remember shifting takes up a ton of mana and when shtf you’ll need all of it.
@@KazeHorse I both have a potion to use directly on my bar, plus the macro to shift into bear form immediately after using the potion. I think having the macro is very important for most times you want to be using a potion, and especially when tanking in dungeons, but you're right that you might not always want to shift into bear form.
An alternative balance/resto spec you can do is to skip Moonkin Form and instead grab Nature's Swiftness and Insect Swarm in resto. You lose the armor and the crit from moonkin, but instead you gain an extra dot and the utility of nature's swiftness (instant root, heal or wrath). And the points in the resto tree as well as Moonglow and Nature's Grace in Balance makes you a formidable healer.
If you want to purely level in Feral andd dont respecc due to money being tight, you shozld still grab Natures Grasp anyway !! It is the most overpowered Tier 1 Talent since it also only requires 1 point !!!!
It really does feel weird that the druid gets a whole elaborate questline not just for Aquatic Form, but also a random spell like Cure Poison... but not Cat Form. I also think they just ran out of dev time.
Shamans have the same problem. You do a short quest for earth totem, medium sized questline for fire and an than an infamous continent-hopping water totem quest! How do you get air totem? There's a dude in a cave and he just teaches you lol
Every hardcore feral wants skinning & tribal leatherworking (after doing a little bit of herbalism for those earthroot, of course), almost entirely for the Wolfshead Helm and its +50% to Furor's effectiveness.
Just don't forget to watch your mana with the addon, shapeshifting that much seriously drains your mana if a paladin buddy doesn't have judgement of wisdom on the target.
If you wanna lvl as Resto for whatever reason going for the standard "flagcarry" spec is a solid option. Just go for Feral Charge and then dump all ur other points into Resto. This way you get all the basic Feral talents and are able to go deep Resto for NS and Swiftmend endgame. Gearwise try to maintain a hybrid set with mostly cat stats and a few good Int pieces alongside ur basic Resto set. This used to be my favourite spec in Classic and I used it for litteraly everything (Solocontent, 5mans, Raids and Ranking - worked great for all this stuff). Admittedly the full power of this build is only unlocked once you get the hybrid endgame gear from AQ40 and PvP, but its still leaving u with all the options you could wish for while leveling.
Barkskin not being usable in bear form really feels bad, it would be an amazing defensive CD, I also miss the fact that Wotlk had more support for HoTs made me like resto more
I just started a druid in classic hardcore. it makes me realize how much they've removed from druids over the years and it makes me super sad :( I've been playing a druid on retail since 2009 till now and damn.... just damn :/
Slowly gets easier and easier as you level. After late 30's and especially 40, the druid is nigh-unkillable if advernturing in the open world. This is the case IF you have a decent level of Druid experience. If you don't use, or understand the benefits of macros with this macro heavy class, you aren't an experienced druid player. You've chosen to play it with one hand tied behind your back, no matter what your excuse is (it's a matter of enlightenment through education and experience). Same can be said for Hunter. On a dedicated HC server where an end game is expected, you'll slam into the same issue every Druid player discovers: you won't be wanted in raids because too many druids exist for the few spots available. Get good at tanking dungeons, and roll a warlock for raiding, it's the least played class and less than 1% reach 60 in HC.
WillE mentioned some macro's at the end of his vid, but expect to be(come) a macro king if you want to go through with this class. I remember macro's with lines like /dismount (you couldn't start casting while on a mount, you really needed to dismount first!) and /stand int it, not to mention the very limited amount of macro's you can create in Classic.
Agi and Str for cat + armor for bear? Even for non-HC its wrong, I'm using "of the monkey" items all the time, and for HC stamina is a must for survivability and also good for tanking. Its better to make a lil less dmg but have much more stamina, less downtime: Mobs still die maybe a few second later, but can kill 1-2 extra more before shifting out for regrowth+reju healing. And also with agi+sta its almost the same gear for cat and bear tanking, and healers thank the extra HP. I also noticed that spr is not that good for feral or resto healing before 60, with spr and without spr on the healgear its just minor OutOfCombat regen (for example around 40 vs 45-48 mana/tick), and its only after not casting for 5 sec, maybe later with the 15% combat regen talent and innervate it can become more useful, but personally as I tested in normal classic, int+stamina is better and mobs can't oneshot druid healers in dungeons from healagro. In HC stamina makes more sense for playing safe. A nice healgear (even though it needs bagspace) can come handy for soloing outdoor elites as full feral (Nekrosh, MorLadim, stv elite crocs and elites etc.) because you can have enough mana to just root/spelldmg kill them. Many times even in bearform it can be risky, some of them hit hard... So my recommendation: Feral (Cat with ocassional healing): of the monkey (agi+stam) or 2nd: of the tiger (agi+str) Healgear (for feralhealing or boomkin): of the eagle (int+stam) or 2nd: of the owl (int+spr) Of course arcane wrath and of healing items can be also handy BTW in HC, druids will not be at disadvantage anymore in dungeons for not having resurrect :)
Just got to lvl 40 in HC as Tauren Druid. Feral is the most popular way to play but im having a lot of fun as balance druid. For RP reasons i like being in my Tauren form, and i kind of got bored of always being in cat form when i followed a guide as a beginner on classic. Feral kill a lot quicker, but also invite damage while balance can just root and never invite damage. Now i have moonkin form and excited to try it out.
So estimated availability of "of the animal" greens: Tiger - 3/10 Druids want it, Shaman want it and Rogues semi want this. Bear - 6/10 Other druids are your main competition. Shaman competition isn't too stiff, rogues have little use for this. Gorilla - 5/10 You'll get the odd shaman/paladin who don't mind wearing leather building a healing set or something, its only 5/10 because people don't bother to list it. Boar - 7/10 This is your chance! Shaman will get some mileage out of it, but shaman shocks put them O5SR and rogues don't want it Monkey - 0/10 Rogues and Hunters and Shaman and others want this too much. And PVP twinks will want it, cutting availability even further. Falcon - 6/10 Shaman and Hunter will get some use out of it and it'll be more likely in the auction house as it is agility leather, so looks good but there is some competition Wolf - 5/10 Hunters will snap this up and rogues use it a fair bit; Shaman shocks 05SR precludes them somewhat. Eagle - 6/10 Listings of eagle leather are somewhat common but not overly so. Shaman and fellow druids will pick this up for pvp healing, but hunters will use it some and rogues basically won't use it. Whale - 7/10 Hunters may compete but often don't need the survivability. Shaman has trouble with getting 05SR for the spirit somewhat. Some Rogues won't prioritize it. More for us! BOOM Owl - 6/10 Hunters will take these on occasion. This is what people think of when they think druid/shaman healing gear so they list it, but its not in high demand.
So if you constructed a set of gear from this just buying the cheapest AH pieces you would get: 3 str 3 agi 6 str 6 sta 5 str 5 int 7 str 7 spi 0 6 agi 6 int 5 agi 5 spi 4 sta 4 int 7 sta 7 spi 6 int 6 spi 21 strength 14 agility 19 stamina 17 intellect* 25 spirit THIS is the power of the druid - that's a perfectly fine spread of stats to absorb. You can use every stat, and taken in a balance, none of them are bad. Cool roleplaying/story integration from blizzard on that one, I'm still nerding out about it. But to min/max: This spread is a little bit low on the agility, it would behoove you to get into a dungeon somewhat often so you can roll on of the monkey and of agility pieces as long as people are okay with it. You can see the problem already - in a dungeon you'll be healing most often and your gear already has a bias toward spirit before you've even started! Do anything you can to get into dungeons as a feral cat so you can roll MS>OS on agility leather. Stamina is also something you want quite a bit of and its relatively light. Getting good stamina leather can be tough. Leatherworking helps here a fair bit to offset the lack of agi/sta leather, but its not necessary; I went alch, and made a ton of money. But I did have some discomfort questing... perhaps this is why. *You'll acquire more just naturally healing dungeons.
for the talents i recommend not getting NW and omen because its a waste in lower level if you know what NW really does go into natures grasp and into feral, you gtg going feral/resto is prob the best thing to do because you can grab the talent that gives you less spell pushback which is huge when needing to heal while in trouble
Honestly I was happy with a single point in natures grasp and more points in the feral tree until. Also once you have a mount you can make a macro to cast Nature’s Grasp and mount up with a single press and that can root mobs or melee pvp’ers without needing to dismount.
I’m super tempted to put one point in Natures Grasp. 11 points into resto (insect swarm isn’t that good but hey … it’s one point). And then going into feral. The only reason I’m hesitant is because feral swiftness is just so good. And of course feral charge is amazing. I’ve been sitting on talents for a while cuz I can’t make up my mind.
#1681 Doing a hardcore Druid this semester. Just hit 13 and finished Teldrassil. Got 18 units this semester and a new job in the hospital. Not much time to play, but utilizing the rested EXP. Going to be a uphill battle but I’m up for the challenge.
Right. Outside of Nefarian and Loatheb, bears are awesome tanks. Same with leveling dungeons, if druid has proper build and know how to play he will handle it much better than arms warrior. If your classic guild runs with deep prot war as a tank I would seruously consider to use feral instead. Somehow whole comunity has huge delusion about bears viability, even those who continue using prot wars.
@@shortkeys73 It also forces warriors into berserker stance and gives them a debuff. I don't see how that's much different than forcing druids into cat form. I suppose it might be a bit rougher than what happens to warrior tanks, but it still means that you need to pay a lot more attention to the main tank's health. I suppose the reason it might be worse with druid tanks is that you also lost a bunch of healer at the same time your tank is taking way more damage, and that might be the actual problem.
Druid have a powerspike at lvl 20 when they shred stuffs but that's hit. In reality you go OOM very quickly as druid and around lvl 30+ you basically stay in bear all time cause for mob density and aggro it's better to just tank and cleave them off if there are no casters present. I found rogue lowkey having an honestly better survivability than druid. (if we are comparing rogue and the standard feral druid leveling)
When I leveled a druid in classic I had a hard time of it. Not a class I would play hardcore, its definitely not to my strengths as a thinker to gestalt the abilities of each form seperately like that. In combat, Healing touch is glacial speed and regrowth OOMs you somewhat quickly, though I admit having any self-heal at all to couple with the rogue-cat toolkit is effing awesome. Just no, I'd rather stick to mage where basically all the buttons blow tish up.
tbh it comes all down to macros - you can arrange your key-bindings so that you have access to all relevant skills in any form. i always had a blast leveling druid - its soo sad druid gets rid of this insane toolkit and is just spamming HT later on...
I personally STRONGLY prefer leveling as a HOTW spec compared to the standard feral sub-balance spec. Getting nature's swiftness at level 50 will be a godsend, as the 50+ zones are much more challenging than any of the zones before it for the most part. Having a one-cast heal to full on a somewhat short CD will save your life in the plaguelands. Also, picking up the healing talents means you are a functional resto druid for dungeon content, rather than a feral with "of healing" gear. Druid survivability in HOTW is 5/5, between nature's swiftness and travel form you are pretty much unkillable outdoors, and bear is the best dungeon tank in classic by a large margin for the average player.
I agree with this assessment. Despite how useful Nature's Grasp can be, as well as Omen of Clarity and the other talents related to them, I find the HOTW spec perfectly serviceable for leveling and being a tank or healer for dungeons with a change of gear. Most of the times I've died on HC (on any class), Nature's Grasp would not have saved me, because there was way more than one mob attacking me. I suppose for Alliance without Sticky Glue, NG can be more important, but even then, I've only used 1 sticky glue on my current druid through level 43, and that was right after a disconnect where I was pretty sure I was dead and used everything I had to try to survive (and just barely made it). I don't use it very often on other characters either. Rooting one enemy with an instant cast just doesn't generally do enough, with either Sticky Glue or NG. As to Omen of clarity and the other talents, well, they're good, but so are the late feral talents, and you'll eventually want the resto talents too if you want to heal dungeons while near the end of leveling. It might be worth while to start in Balance until you can respec and get the better feral talents, so planning on burning one respec once 1g isn't a huge amount, but I don't have an issue just starting going straight for HOTW and not even picking up Furor until I have LOTP.
@@stevenglowacki8576 Honestly I think LOTP is highly overrated, especially when compared to nature's swiftness (since you get either one or the other). Obviously in a raid setting LOTP is borderline necessary and NS useless (in feral forms), but outside of explicitly feral dps i find HOTW to always be the higher survivability and flexibility spec. The 20% int bonus + 15% mana regen is severely underrated when questing because you have to go out of and into form after every few mobs to heal. You literally become a nonstop killing machine. I also cannot tell you how many times tanking at 60 I have saved myself with a NS + HT on myself to go from 1% to 100% during a bad pull/rng
Will you do the same series for wotlk-hc? I would really love that. Anyways, I will also listen to your era-hc series. I love your style of presenting the content, its like reading a good book
while i agree that these are the builds that are generally good for leveling, none of these are consistent enough for hardcore, where you only have a single life. going into balance until 20 (for omen) has its upsides, but creates awkward situations with rage, healing (and energy) and requires a respec at 20 if you want these problems to go away before level 30. going deep feral is very risky, as pulling more than a single mob can easily result in character deletion. not to mention, none of these builds can consistently/safely solo elites
Soothe animal may not be all that useful to a druid since they can stealth (unless maybe a whole group is trying to run by and avoid the aggro of one specific animal?), however I did want to mention that a priest's mind soothe is much MUCH more helpful - it's a poor man's stealth because it accomplishes basically that, but with one mob at a time. What it does is essentially lower the aggro radius of a mob, so if you mind soothe (or animal soothe) a mob, then it changes their aggro range from what would have been, say, 40 yards down to 20 or 15 yards, so if there's a mob you were unable to narrowly pass by without aggroing them, mind soothe will make sure you'll be able to do that.
Are there any classic Druid changes that happened? They patched wotlk differently than vanilla wotlk. Made some nice changes to make certain elements better and smooth out gameplay.
I was given 215g to heal BRD by some nice but desperate noobs. I quickly respect put on some squirmy intel/spirit gear and took them through. None one had the shadow shadowforge key and when I told them how to get the quest refused. I told them you are missing out on half the dungeon. Anyway easy gold no deaths and free gear and 2 levels in XP 😜
I have never played Vanilla and this video makes me realize that I would never enjoy it. There are just too many fun killers. WOTLK is much more polished and player friendly.
Earthroot is actually really easy to find for the Poison quest, just go in a ring around the outside of Mulgore and you will find the 5 earthroot needed.
Id like to play feral for tank bc i really wanna try a tank char but im worried im gonna be missing out on some things. Is it really as viable of a tank as warr?
yes, should be for near every application. Almost better , in some people's eyes..(large health pool ;) Both are superior as long as you are paying attention. ¾
The main issue you will have as a bear compared to a warrior is threat generation. It will became easier as you get better gear however. Also many of the best items for threat generation are also the best car form items. Maul crits and MCP are the best sources of threat. But lower lever it’s almost impossible to hold Aggro over a busting Mage or Shaman.
Wouldnt it be cool, if you died on HC, you have a like 20s time limit to res that person, it would be just like irl if you get like a major heart attack that stops your heart, theres atleast a chance you get ressurected! Think about it!!
Lmao, must be a bot comment. I dont want to believe you think you have any skill in gaming when all you do is play wow. The only skill you have is being braindead enough to still play this boring garbage
If you're gonna tell people to farm mobs for earthroot might as well tell them to unlearn whatever proffesion they have at 100 and start from 0 with herba temporarily. There are a lot of vendors they can check out for plants instead.
generally they are out of stock because of that, farming mobs for some items is very useful I farmed elementals on Teldrassil for earthroot and it only took me half a hour, stop being dramatic.
For Druid I suggest leveling with Skinning + Herbs or Mining for money then dropping one for you preferable profession once you have the mats for your Devilsaur set.
Guys as a pure PvPer i wanna ask .. how does a Hc player do battlegrounds?? Please tell me we can.. else i really see no point in this game mode after 60..
Once 60 you can choose to become "Immortal" (in other words, getting back to a regular char) so that you can PvP as much as you want. You just need to find a fairly active server that does not have a majority of HC players. Or just get 60 on a regular char without the add-on from the go on.
