WotLK Druid Changes – Feral Tanking and Bugs

I think it’s fair to say there is a lot of work to be done before the druid class is ready to go live. Clearly the issue with feral tanking druids is still up the air. The nerf to predatory instincts is not surprising, and certainly justifiable. Allowing a tank a percentage based mitigation ability of that magnitude was bound to be imbalanced.

The message I got from these blue posts was one more of uncertainty than anything else. They clearly have some underlying tanking issues that will need to be resolved in order for the class to fit into the current model for tanks in WotLK.

Most of these changes and bug fixed will be included in the build 9038 druid changes.

Feral Tanking
With regard to abilities, we have been torn between giving bears (and cats) more unique abilities versus giving them tanking abilities that many players considered “core.” We could have certainly come up with something more original than Last Stand for bears, but at the time, a lot of bears were comparing laundry lists of buttons and said bears wouln’t be invited to raids because they didn’t have an oh snap button like Last Stand. We put that functionality in Berserk, then later backed off of that so that we could make Berserk a more fun button to push as bear. (Source)

Typhoon
I’m not aware of any changes to Typhoon’s damage. If you’re just talking about Rank 5, we had to just temporarily yank it to make sure it was becoming untrained — despite the last hotfix, druids were still ending up with it when we added the rank back in. We should be able to add it back next patch.

Also understand that if it hadn’t been abused so much that we wouldn’t have had to yank it. It’s not terribly fair or helpful to complain about not having access to the ability when it was being used to overpower bosses and other players to such extremes. While the bug was ours (mine in all likelihood), we’re not going to be able to get back all of those busted battles, yanno?

Predatory Instincts
Reducing AoE Damage by 30% instead of 15%
Predatory Instincts is a huge nerf. You just haven’t seen it yet. It only works in cat form.

I hinted that this might happen before, but as it was, a druid was going to be the only tank people took for dragons like Malygos. That would have been particularly true for any encounter that was supposed to be a resist fight, because the druid could skip a lot of the resist gear. Your health pool should still make sure you handle those fights sufficiently.

Treants
The Treant health appears to be too low. They aren’t updating correctly from your Stamina or level or something. We’ll get it fixed.