5 Boxing Druids -- Seems weak?

[Kjarahz]

Holy frustration!

Just ran a team of druids to 28, wow am I frustrated!

My tank dies non-stop. It's quite insane how easy he dies.
I can't even do Scarlet Halls I die to the first boss over and over.
The ads kill me before I can kill them.

No threat issues, I just can't spam nourish enough with hots.

I ran a team of 5 to 30 the previous day, Warrior 3x Mages 1x Disc. Priest.
No issues, the warrior is very solid no close calls really at all. I breezed through
each dungeon without problem.

My druids are spamming moonfire, I assume this is lackluster but not causing the deaths.

Can someone please advise, perhaps some better DPS macro's/AOE ones as well? On another
note the character are dungeon geared, missing plenty of pieces however, my other team
was just as poorly geared.

Any advice?

[Ualaa]

Moonfire is pretty pathetic damage.
The initial portion is instant, but the majority of the damage is from the DOT portion over time.
By spamming it, they're doing low damage and wasting a lot of mana.
Which means the mobs are alive a lot longer than they need to be.
That translates into more pounding on the tank and the healer going through mana like crazy.

Wrath spam or Starfire spam, either way is going to increase your kill power dramatically.
For quest NPCs (the mobs you need to kill or remove so you can collect stuff), I found it was 6-7x Wrath to kill things (meaning just slightly more than one volley from five druids).
One Starfire volley (x5 casts) was similar damage to two Wrath volleys (10x casts).

I'm not sure if it is still the case, but at one point Blizzard had acknowledged that Feral Druids were missing a couple tools that they needed for tanking.
They got these in the upper 70s.
Now that it is a Guardian Spec for tanking, I'm not sure if that is still the case.



I did not go the dungeon route, but when I leveled druids they were 5x Feral, and that seemed to be massively overpowered.
They were easily able to kill every mob, along the Zygor quest progression, even (intentionally) forgetting to use the click-this-item to reduce the mobs power.
Only the guy who explodes in Hyjal, unless you run away... could not be overpowered.
For perspective, my 4x Death Knights + 1x Holy Paladin team, wiped in six encounters that the Druids breezed through without even a slight hiccup.

My rotation was a simple one:
#show
/castsequence reset=target Mangle(Cat Form), Rake(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Ferocious Bite(Cat Form)

For tougher mobs I had a different rotation, essentially the same except for alternating finishers:
#show
/castsequence reset=target Mangle(Cat Form), Rake(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Rip(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Rake(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Mangle(Cat Form), Ferocious Bite(Cat Form)

It's worth noting, that for questing I basically never got to either finishing move.
10x Mangles, with some Rips... obliterated everything.

The rotation was essentially alternating IWT (with CTM on) and the first castsequence.

As a Feral Druid, sometime fairly early you gain automatic/passive heals when you land a critical hit.
And the critical rate was somewhere around 35-40%, so they each got a heal every 6 seconds or so (the cooldown on the ability).
The act of whacking things in melee, restores a healthy amount of mana; after even a short fight, a previously out-of-mana druid has enough for several casts.
Rejuvenation x5, on 1-2 druids... as needed, then back into cat form is strong heals.
You can even pre-HOT your team, or one Druid only (who while Feral, goes Bear Form just to generate initial threat).

Predatory Swiftness (at 26th), gets you a 20% chance for an instant cast per combo point spent, with a finisher move.
Druids (and Rogues) have an ability where they can often get 2 combo points.
I worked out the math, given a 30% crit rate (my team was always higher crit rate than that), and you had between 97 and 98 percentage chance for your spell to be instant, when you used a finisher (which in the rotation follows four 1-Combo Point manuevers... meaning 80% chance to generate the instant cast, if none of the first four moves failed to generate the extra combo point, and a 100% chance is even one of the four previous moves did).
You basically want to round robin the Predatory Swiftness, tying it to Healing Touch (or Regrowth, if the glyph for that basically gets you +40% critical heals still).
I also had Predatory Swiftness on a separate key, for Nature's Swiftness (which glyphed, was a 100% hit point rez in combat... and powerful as an instant cast).

I don't see Nature's Swiftness.
It seems to be replaced with Ysera's Gift - that's passive pulsing heals to the Druid... or at full health, to an ally (your other Toon).
Nature's Vigil is way down the road, but it provides heals just by killing things.
You can round-robin both of these... tap once or twice, for some heals... spam when the shit hits the fan.

[Kjarahz]

Thanks for the message it's quite informative.

On a side note it was Starfire that I was spamming sorry for the confusion,
not a Druid player at all. In fact it's really not a huge choice for me as I main
a warrior which could attribute to better play and tanking.

It seems many are going IWT/Melee comps nowadays. Wasn't quite the case
back in the day when I would boxing, it was kind of just getting hot around that
time.

For some reason I really like casting, minus the major pain of someone getting turned
around or the like. Which I'm still trying to combat with a G15 key setup to stop
strobing and go into formation. It can just be sketchy sometimes.

Recommend melee even if I want to cast? I suppose if it's better and more effective why not?
Not what I wanted however is the only thing.

Again, thanks for the response it's got great information!

[Ualaa]

Recommend melee even if I want to cast? I suppose if it's better and more effective why not?
Not what I wanted however is the only thing.

If you want to go with casters, I would suggest going with casters... try to make it work.
My team was originally going to be Balance, but someone suggested trying Feral (for increased burst, back then) and I really liked it, although the style was very different.

You could try 5x Boomkin, as a previous poster suggested.

You could also bypass dungeons for a while, and quest... as Boomkins are quite adept at blowing up outdoor quest type stuff... and then resume dungeons, once you have more of the tanking tools, or whatever.

I've been away from the game since Cataclysm; can anyone confirm whether you still need to shift out of Moonkin form in order to cast healing spells? I can't find any information on wowhead tooltips about this.

I thought they introduced a glyph which let Moonkin cast Healing Touch and Rejuvenation, without dropping form.
Cannot seem to find it, on the wowhead talent planner.

[MiRai]

I've never run a Druid tank before, but I had heard that they're pretty squishy in the early levels. Not sure if that information holds up true today or not.

[Akoko]

Druid levelling is incredibly painful especially early on, to say the least. Bears are THE WORST tank at low levels. In certain cases I actually found that using 5 Balance Druids was more efficient for dungeons than using 1 Guardian, 3 Balance, and 1 Resto. Using dual-spec I would only switch to having the dedicated tank/healer for certain boss fights. Ferals were too much of a nuisance to control in dungeons but would probably be the most efficient for questing out in the world.

The way to survive with 5 Balance Druids is to use round-robin on Typhoon to keep all melee mobs away from you indefinitely (make sure to include /stopcasting in the macro). Spellcaster mobs can be shut down with round-robin Solar Beam. Round-robin for click healing with Nature's Swiftness is also useful but usually stuff would be blown up pretty fast before any healing was needed.

Disclaimer: I'm a Druid masochist. My main is a Druid and I have two 5-box teams of Druids. At times it was so frustrating that I wished I had a Paladin or Warrior tank with 4 Shamans or Priests.

This is only theorycrafting, but with my new team I'm planning to go 1 Guardian and 4 Balance rather than having a dedicated healer because Resto is also pretty weak early on. Hopefully Cenarion Ward and Nature's Swiftness on round-robin should be enough to keep the tank alive, but I haven't given this a try yet. New team is only level 11 as I just started a new RaF.

I've been away from the game since Cataclysm; can anyone confirm whether you still need to shift out of Moonkin form in order to cast healing spells? I can't find any information on wowhead tooltips about this.

[ebony]

i manged to get 5x Feral to level 60 i got board of the group.

someone that does a lot twitch steaming ran five a few months back he was running them all as boomkins he did not seems to have a prob (and he really does go for easy classess)

[Dranny817]

I am currently doing 5 druids all boomers cleared all instances up to lvl 70 so far no problems at all. Not sure if I have done every single one but everyone I have had via the LFG tool I have completed without any issues.

[Kjarahz]

I made it to 35 last night but was just not cranking out the DPS for the Scarlet dungeons.
Managed to finish the first but not the second. The first boss was a problem on the second,
just spawned to many things that destroyed my group quickly.

Switched my resto druid over to healing touch and keeping with the same HoT I had and it's working
better but some situations are just not happening. Will end up switching the heals on the click bar
for the rest of the team to healing touch as well. I don't burn a full mana bar in a fight ever anyway.

Still going to investigate what I can do to proceed in a better and more effective manor, my goal is
to dungeon run until 85, just my preferred method as questing is just a pain at times. I have to say
this team requires way more upkeep than previous with different classes though just so surprised
how much.

On the flip side it might be nice to have a little bit of a challenge, I was quite tired from work over
the past weeks though. Breezing through would have been a good thing ha.

[Akoko]

Got from level 11 to level 25 last night running Guardian + 4 Balance. I can confirm that Moonkins can now cast healing spells without leaving Moonkin form (no glyph required, this is baseline), a MAJOR improvement over the way it was before.

Just 4x Rejuv on the tank, pull and spam DPS macro, everything should blow up without issues. At this stage I think a dedicated Resto healer is a waste of space.