patch 2.0.10 notes on the PTR

[TheDragoon]

Some random responses:

Innervates (and Rebirths) do not happen while the druid is tanking. Innervating the priest is a good way to wipe a raid if you're the tank.

They CAN happen, you just have to be smart about it. Realize that Bolty is used to playing with my Druid and that I have often been known to pop out of bear, battle res/innervate him and then pop back into bear. Of course, this doesn't work out in all situations, but whenever something can distract a boss, causing it to stop attacking the tank for a second, the opportunity is there to do this sort of thing. It is somewhat reckless, but if you do it right it ususally isn't a problem.:)

A cat druid who keeps pace with you isn't spot healing, he isn't innervating, and he isn't rebirthing.

I do not quite agree since innervate and rebirth are practically instant. It is not a problem at all to shift out and do these in the middle of a fight without losing much. Spot healing is more problematic, but if you take the chance to throw around some lifeblooms/rejuvs while you are shifted, that can work ok.

Prot DPS is viable provided they have the gear for it. The druid camp was getting both for free for a while.

This is not quite accurate. This was true while leveling up (where good cat gear could work perfectly fine as tank gear), but when I hit level 70, it quickly became apparent that the cat gear while tanking wasn't going to cut it. Fortunately, there are quests out there to get some pretty darn good tanking greens/blues so you can gear up that way. However, at this point my Druid has completely separate gear sets for cat DPS, bear tanking and healing. Druids need gear just as much (if not more) than other classes who hope to fit into multiple roles. :)

Let me use a cat druid as example. On the face of it it's a "Rogue" who can go healer if needed - wonderful! The cost is he only does about 80% of Rogue damage given comparably geared and skilled players

However to do damage the druid with be in Strength, Crit and AP gear. When he shifts he can get off about 4 heals then is out of mana without the Spirit to ever get mana back any time soon. He is worth maybe a tenth of a real healer if that

Alternatively he can use some of the gear that is aimed at hybrid role. This has approximately 2/3 of the dps stats of real dps gear and about 2/3 of the healing stats of real healing gear

Because he's now not in dps gear he now does about 60% of the dps of a real dpser with the option to be about 25% of a healer

Just take one dps and one healer instead of 2 hybrids. You get 100% dps + 100% healer instead of 120% dps or 50% healer. In situations where you have an excess of healing you can simply move faster as a raid

The other often touted value of a hybrid is being able to turn into a tank in a crisis. Between high armour, parry block dodge and crit and crushing blow negation a good raid tank is probably at about 85% physical mitigation. If one of your healers, in healing gear, turns into a bear he will have about 40% mitigation. So you go from a tank which only takes 15% damage to a tank which takes 60% damage, 4 times as much. This isn't going to save the raid more than one in a million times. In fact there will be just as many times when the player might save the raid by staying healer and throwing out some heals as by changing into a pretty awful tank

I don't have any particular response to this, but this is a very good summary of the way things actually work. The idea that a Druid can do several roles well by only changing forms is a major misconception by many people. Mid-fight, Druids are fairly well locked into whatever role they are in with only a fraction of the ability to switch to something else unless they are wearing hybrid gear (at which point they are ok but not as good at everything).