PvE - 5 Druids vs Tank & 4 Shamans - my experiences so far

[Stealthy]

I've been working my way through heroics on my DK / 4 x Sham team with some success - have Gundrak and Drak'Tharon on farm now and will be hitting up some of the other instances this week...

Anyway, a while ago I also levelled up 5 druids, which I had kinda shelved prior to 3.1 - so on the weekend, I dusted them off, dual-specced the main, chucked on some tanking gear and hit heroic Gundrak...and promptly got my face smashed in on the first boss. inch: I wasn't quite perpared for the difference in playstyle that an all druid group needs in heroics.

So I went back to the drawing board, did some some research on spec - came accross an interesting post here:

http://tarskin.blogspot.com/2009/04/...ed-mangle.html

Did some more research on gear, found out that some of my gear was actually pretty crap for tanking - if you haven't used Rawr before, I highly recommend checking it out here:

http://druid.wikispaces.com/Rawr

Finally I redid some of my macros to make it easier for me to tank and heal at the same time.

The result of round 2 - dropped the boss without major problems.

Some things to note:

- Druid group tanking is a much more healing intensive fight than a tank / shaman combo. Multiple healing stream totems make it a lot easier for the latter, basically smoothing out the damage somewhat. Druid tanks may have a larger health pool than other tanks, but lack the avoidance of DK's & Pallies. Keep up rejuv's and lifeblooms, complement with regrowths & and nourishes where needed.

- AoE tanking is defintiely harder with a druid tank. Swipe is 360 degrees now wich is great, but having death & decay, unholy blight or consecration ticking away and automatically picking up mobs that move through it is much easier. For trash pulls it's not much of a problem, since you can almost always get a few swipes in before healing is needed. In boss fights wehre mobs spawn though, a mob can spawn and move out of range of your swipe while you're waiting for your GCD to clear.

- Elementals > Treants - pretty obvious I know...but treants only have few thousand HP each, which makes them pretty useless against any heroic mob that AoE's. They do offer a nice dps boost against tank & spank bosses though, and can be useful for picking up agro for a few secs against bosses that go through threat resets. But elementals are just sooooo much better.

- Druid mana regen sucks in 3.1! With the shamans using Thunderstorm and mana spring, I can pretty much go through a whole instance without drinking. With the druids, especially after the spirit nerf - I'd be lucky to go through two pulls without drinking. Innervate sucks now as well - I don't even get 1/2 a mana bar back from it. Timed CoS run? Aint gonna happen on these guys...

- Gear itemization from Druid tanks is really bad. Outside of raids, the BiS gear from heroics is a real mish mash of pieces. In fact several of the BiS slot items are actually PvP pieces...lol!

So overall I'd say that an all druid group is definitely viable for heroics, but it's definitely harder going than with a tank/shaman group.

just my thoughts...

Cheers,

S

[Smoooth]

I have a 5x druid group just starting in Northrend and have made them 2nd in priority to my mixed group for PvE. I was wondering if you have tried any PvP on your druid team. I'm thinking about specing them all either feral or balance. Feral could be fun with round robin pouncing and tearing people up. Or just nuking people in moonkin form. Any info on 5xdruid pvp at 80? Sorry if I'm off topic.

On topic: How do you spec your team? 1 bear, 1 tree, 3 moonkin?