Druids Officially Regain TBC Godmode Status, PvE DPS Class Comparisons

Arena Druids
Anyone playing arena right now (hell, even in PvE) has probably come to the realization that Restoration Druids are so unbelievably overpowered that their status of dominance as a healer in almost any comp or bracket dwarfs any other to date, even overshadowing the holy paladins of season five. As if the buffs to tree form in patch 3.1 wern't enough, as well as the new Glyph of Barkskin, Druids also more recently received a massive overall buff to Innervate, causing it to restore 450% of the druid's base mana to the target. At level 80, a druid's base mana pool is 3496, so 450% of that means that the new innervate restores 15,732 mana (18,877 mana glyphed). When coupled with the new Improved Barkskin talent, this is a virtually guaranteed full mana bar for any druid in arena right now at current gear levels with plenty of mana to spare.

Sure, druids needed some love after being shafted by plague strike all season five but was this really necessary? Many people have been complaining about how overpowered this all is, particularly how unkillable druids are when sitting in tree form and spamming HoT's, so how does Blizzard react? They buff druids.

The new patch notes currently state two new changes for Druids:

-Improved Tree of Life: The armor bonus to Tree of Life Form from this talent has been reduced to 67/133/200% bonus armor.

At first glance, most people will be thinking "thank God" after reading that because of how stupidly overpowered tree form is right now. But then you have the second patch note:

-Improved Barkskin: This talent now also grants 80/160% additional armor while in Travel Form or not shapeshifted.

The first time I read this, I thought it was another much needed nerf to the class, basically changing barkskin to no longer have dispel resistance and instead only provide some additional armor in travel and caster form, which is perfectly fine considering the other nerf to tree form tanking. But when asked about this change on the healing forums, Ghostcrawler clarified the notes, stating:

The caster and travel form armor benefits occur if you have the talent even if Barkskin is not up.

While we were succesful getting Resto druids into tree form in Arena, we were a little too succesful. We're not sure it's fun for either the druid or the people trying to kill the druid to be locked in tree form all the time. This change will hopefully make the fights a little more dynamic.

Oookay, so after taking one step forward, Blizzard officially takes three more steps back in the wrong direction. Do they really want Druids to go back to the days of being not only the best arena healers in terms of survivability, raw healing throughput, healing mana efficiency, AND now crowd control once again? Have they really forgotten about the days of root -> root -> root -> cyclone -> cyclone -> cyclone -> bash?

This type of CC was and is still possible in Wrath of the Lich King, with the only difference being that it is far more risky for the druid to leave protective shapeshift forms (bear and tree) in order to perform this CC, which is a perfectly reasonable trade-off. The CC is very powerful and among the best in the game, especially if there is no magic dispel on the other team for entangling roots. With this new patch change, Blizzard is effectively removing the risk of druids shifting caster form to CC opponents now. Sounds great, doesn't it?

I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but I actually feel Druids are even more powerful currently than ever before. In fact, with me and Serration on our 3v3 team playing against anything with a resto druid on it, it is literally impossible for us to kill most resto druids unless they have absolutely no HoT's on themselves. "Hey, the druid is standing right next to us, let's swap to him. JK HE HAS A LIFEBLOOM ON." That's basically what usually happens and we always have to end up targetting everyone BUT the druid which is rather stupid considering the amount of damage and control our team can put out in the opener, but nvm, he's barkskinned.

Druids need to be nerfed or arena is going to reach yet another all-time low possibly. I'm not crying about them because I've lost to them or anything, but rather because of how stupidly undeniable their prowess is right now and how they're only going to become better unless something is done. The dispel resistance of Improved Barkskin needs to go (guaranteed 100% mana innervates from being OOM isn't skill), Banish needs to be 10 second duration in PvP again to punish druids that healbot from tree form, lifebloom shouldn't heal for partial dispels (ie purging a triple lifebloom stack down to 1x), and the new Imp Barkskin buff should also be removed. Then we might see some semblance of a balanced healer class.





PvE DPS Class Comparisons
With the restructuring and redesign of World of Ming, there have been many requests to have PvE content on a regular basis here. While I'm personally skeptical of the reader audience for PvE writing, being that I currently raid with one of the top raiding guilds in the US, I figured I would try the waters at least and see where it goes. That said, in this article, I wanted to begin with this topic by discussing PvE DPS class comparisons, particularly in Ulduar.

I'll preface that I openly admit that I don't know all the ins and outs of every spec for every class in regards to PvE performance, but I know I have a good grasp of it all and also know what our DPS classes currently put out in raids and who has really dominated the damage meters for each encounter.

Before getting into it, however, keep in mind that damage meters are very difficult to accurately gauge the strength (or lackthereof) of a DPS class unless it is a mostly unbias fight. Almost no fight in Naxxramas can be an accurate representation due to the speed and ease of the encounters and how much they can be stacked. Ulduar is also very encounter-specific when it comes to damage meters. So when comparing how well your DPS classes do, you really need to keep in mind that the mechanics of each fight can really impact the numbers they produce. Going through every encounter, here are my thoughts on them in regards to DPS numbers:

-Flame Leviathan: Obviously irrelevant with vehicles used
-Razorscale: Irrelevant due to speed of encounter and HP on the adds
-Ignis the Furnace Master: RNG based depending on how many times you get slag potted
-XT 002 Deconstructor (Hardmode): RNG based depending on how many debuffs (gravity bombs and light sparks) you get
-Assembly of Iron (Hardmode Steelbreaker last): Very good DPS comparison. 10 mill hp burn with no variables.
-Kologarn: RNG based fight with grips and favoring melee due to beams
-Auriaya: Slightly RNG based with the feral defender and its pounce/rush, but overall decent for gauging numbers.
-Hodir (Hardmode): More RNG than TBC warrior mace stun
-Thorim (Hardmode): RNG based depending on frost novas, blizzard, and lightning charges
-Freya (Hardmode): Slightly RNG based with roots, nature's fury, and trees that need to be ranged down, etc, but overall still a good DPS comparison
-Mimiron (Hardmode): Despite how melee unfriendly this fight is in general, this is a heavily melee favored fight for Hardmode due to the mechanics with the fire and melee being relatively immune to it.
-General Vezax (Hardmode): Bias fight due to obvious shadow crash effect, the aura, and the fact that Elemental Shamans completely dominate this fight with Clearcasting
-Yogg-Saron (Hardmode): Bias fight due to both areas being different, favoring DoT classes, etc.

So with all of that in mind, where does that usually rank DPS classes in order from best to worst in a relatively balanced encounter (without a ton of adds to pad numbers on for unholy dk's and such)? Well, every guild has their pros and their scrubs, but from what I've seen and read, it goes something like this for us:

1. Feral Druids
2. Combat Rogues
3. Mutilate Rogues
4. Mages
5. Warlocks
6. Blood/Unholy Death Knights
7. Shadow Priests
8. Retribution Paladins
9. Elemental/Enhance Shamans
10. Marksmanship/Survival Hunters
11. Balance Druids
12. Arms Warriors
13. Anything not listed (fury warriors, frost DK's, tanks, etc)

Before people get all into telling me how wrong this list is and all, again, keep in mind that every guild has their stronger classes or DPS classes that they have better raid comps for, but this is generally what I've noticed from encounters that don't overly benefit any spec over another.

So why is this list this way? There's obviously a ton of factors as to why each class is in its respective ranking, but to be very brief, I'll try to give a small explanation on each of them.

1. Feral Druids - Extremely retarded damage ever since the buffs to armor penetration and the ability for bleeds to crit.
2. Combat Rogues - Combat tree buffs, armor penetration boosts, Killing Spree buff, and 4pc rupture crit bonus all made them much stronger.
3. Mutilate Rogues - See above.
4. Mages - Mages do a massive amount of damage on fights where they can be dedicated to one target to roll ignites and dump hot streak procs such as XT and Hodir, or fights with lots of adds like Freya, but often fall behind in fights that require movement such as Thorim.
5. Warlocks - Same as above if playing destruction. Affliction typically falls too far behind to be considered except in rare circumstances for encounters that require a lot of movement.
6. Death Knights - DK's excel and dominate fights that have lots of adds due to blood boil and unholy blight, but are far more "in-line" when it comes to any single target boss fight.
7. Shadow Priests - I'm not really sure why, but Shadow Priests seem to start every new WoW expansion dominating the damage meters at the start and then slowly sliding off down toward the bottom due to inferior scaling compared to other classes. Although this has been slightly remedied with the addition of Mind Sear, it still seems to be true for most single target fights.
8. Retribution Paladins - Despite the fact that Ret Paladins can completely rape someone in a few globals in arena, they arn't THAT ridiculous for PvE dps. Some fights favor them much more where they can use consecrate on a ton of adds, but typically they fall down toward the bottom on a single target fight.
9. Elemental/Enhance Shamans - This is one of the classes and specs that I'm least familiar with the workings of, so all I know is that basically their damage is not very impressive despite the fact that they can really never run out of mana. Maybe someone can clue me in on this.
10. Hunters - Although most raiding hunters since early WotLK (after BM nerfs) have been Survival for Replenishment, many hunters are now running with the 7/57/7 Marksmanship spec and putting out some impressive numbers. This ranking could be completely off or maybe just because our hunters blow, but it seems despite the Marks buffs in 3.1, the class still seems to trail behind other pure DPS classes, partly because pets arn't viable on every fight.
11. Balance Druids - Balance druids don't really offer a raid much that other classes can't do better such as ele shamans for their crit bonus, ret paladins for their haste bonus, and unholy dk's for their damage bonus, and they bring less than stellar damage right now due to scaling issues as well as a buggy 4pc t8 bonus (changed next patch, however).
12. Arms Warriors - And usually dead last come the Arms warriors who, despite having close to 100% armor ignore now with Battle Stance, Mace Specialization, and proper gearing/gemming, cannot win a DPS meter to save their life unless the fight heavily favors them somehow although I don't really know any that do.

So what's the point of this all? Well, first off, aside from the long-standing issue that melee classes scale better than casters typically, I really feel that the armor penetration buff was a bit overboard. Every melee class almost aside from certain exceptions like mutilate rogues and unholy dk's will be gearing for 100% armor penetration which is already attainable with a simple trinket proc from Grim Toll or Mjolnir Runestone. Once attained, these melee classes will just continually pile on other stats, only further increasing the margin of lead that they have right now over casters. Armor penetration seems far too easy to max out given current itemization values and makes gemming and gearing pretty linear, rather than giving melee classes an option; right now, it's either stack ArP or gimp yourself, period.

And on one final note on this matter, I think warriors could stand to use a lot of buffs in PvE. PvP aside, they are one of the most boring, weak, and one-dimensional classes in raiding environments. Not only that, but they do completely inferior damage even given optimal gearing right now with the armor penetration and battle stance buffs. Protection warriors could use a lot of love with block (prot paladins also), Arms warriors could really use another rage dump (read: instant), and fury warriors need to be less punished for spec'ing TG so the entire tree isn't ruled out of a class' spec options.

That pretty much wraps it up. Like I originally mentioned, I have no idea how receptive the community is to PvE articles, and I actually have something even better to write about next time I do this, but feel free to +1 this article if you appreciated the PvE content to give some better indication of desirability. Thanks.