I am not irate today, I am saddened to the point of almost tears. Call me lame, I don’t care. Blizzard announced the Druid class changes in Cataclysm today and along with it they dropped a bomb. Tree of Life will now be a cooldown ability rather than a ‘permanent’ form.
This makes me so incredibly sad. I play a druid BECAUSE of the forms. I play a druid because I love being in tree form and healing my friends. I don’t care about what my gear looks like, if I did I would play another healing class. This is taking away what makes us druids love our class, what makes us unique and special. I couldn’t imagine tanking without being in bear form, or nuking without being a tree, or pouncing without being a cat. If I want to see my gear, I’ll shift out and look at it. But when I’m playing my class with other people, I AM A TREE. Bottom line.
The above image comes from Tree Bark Jacket, a great druid blog. Spread it around and post it on your site if you agree with the sentiment. Blizzard, please don’t wreck the essence of being a druid. Do not make me a tree only when I activate a cooldown. My druid *IS* a tree, and that’s how she wants to stay.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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Aiiee, I wholeheartedly agree. Tree druids are something of a liability in battlegrounds as it’s quite easy to spot them in a crowd, unlike, say, a healing shaman, paladin or even priest. But the reverse of this is that I find deep joy playing off other tree druids – there’s nothing to beat the sight of two trees utterly surrounded by their Horde comrades, with swirling leaf HoTs and Tranquility stars blazing. I find it is the epitome of being, er, botanical.
Whilst healer tauren are going to be just as easy to spot (since they remain the only cloth form), it’s certainly not as impressive.. and I dare say the less bulky night elves are going to have an advantage there!
This is a great shame, especially since their main justifications seem at odds with the appeal of druids. As you describe, druid players typically don’t mind that their gear doesn’t show (and what kind of narcissist of _any_ class worries how they look _in combat_ anyway?).
Plus I certainly can’t imagine that druid healers feel hard done by when they can’t use the ‘offense and utility’ they’re giving up: having been a full-specced healer of other kinds I’d be inclined to argue that in a raid environment (or even most groups) that utility is negligible, and the offence is almost always counter-productive. And let’s not forget that even with ToL as it currently is, if things are going bad enough I could always leave form: I don’t see holy priests being able to turn into bears when they need some emergency spike resistance…
I didn’t used to understand druids. I had a friend who played one, in the early days, before any of us had been near the level cap, and we had an odd conversation one day about the way he used the phrase ‘caster form’.
“That’s you.” I said, thinking that he didn’t need a special name for his default form.
“They’re all me.” was the reply.
It only really made sense once I’d got one to the level cap myself…
Good luck with trying to change anything. This game is a monolith and for every person that is unhappy they have thousands more that are not. Because of this, the game company can push forth any change they see fit. Its what happened to me when they suddenly gave out enchanting abilities to everyone in the game who didn’t level enchanting.
However these type of changes are harder when its the actual character that you play. I hope they make some concessions in this case.
“Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.”
Are you serious Blizzard? Druids don’t care about what we look like, we love our forms. If you take a form away your taking something that makes the druid class different from all the other classes. What are you going to do next? Put bear form on a CD because it has too big of an ass and gets too much health and armor?
“Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade.”
Do you really know how WoW works? A healadin can’t tank or dps. A disc priest can’t heal.
(Sorry if I got a bit ranty there, I love my druids)