06-30-2005, 11:28 PM
Druids do get an AoE heal: Tranquility. It's pretty decent although with quite a long cooldown
I think though the class is flawed at the design stage. Basically as a hybrid it has damage - healing - tanking. Compared to a specialist it should be worse in one but better in the other two.
However if you compare it with a priest it's a lot worse than them in two areas. Damage is much lower than a shadow spec priest. Healing & ressing is worse. Even tanking, if you look at the ability to take a beating when you've blown all your mana healing the main tank and don't have enough for bearform is arguably worse. So while there are strengths - stealth, tracking, the buffs, the restoration tree - none of them are primary role strengths. Also the fact that bear is actually quite decent for tanking is usually a moot point because warriors and pallies are so common and healers are much rarer so when a druid groups he/she usually heals. Even where you have shaman and druid as the possible tank and healer it's almost always shaman tank and druid healer.
I can see why they've given priests the potential for decent damage-dealing. Few enough players want to play healers already, if priests sucked at pvp and levelled twice as slowly as the current crawl it would be a nightmare trying to form a pickup group. But in holding candy out to the priests they've rather eclipsed two of the hybrids. I don't want to see priests nerfed. But I do think that paladins and druids are entitled to a buff
I think though the class is flawed at the design stage. Basically as a hybrid it has damage - healing - tanking. Compared to a specialist it should be worse in one but better in the other two.
However if you compare it with a priest it's a lot worse than them in two areas. Damage is much lower than a shadow spec priest. Healing & ressing is worse. Even tanking, if you look at the ability to take a beating when you've blown all your mana healing the main tank and don't have enough for bearform is arguably worse. So while there are strengths - stealth, tracking, the buffs, the restoration tree - none of them are primary role strengths. Also the fact that bear is actually quite decent for tanking is usually a moot point because warriors and pallies are so common and healers are much rarer so when a druid groups he/she usually heals. Even where you have shaman and druid as the possible tank and healer it's almost always shaman tank and druid healer.
I can see why they've given priests the potential for decent damage-dealing. Few enough players want to play healers already, if priests sucked at pvp and levelled twice as slowly as the current crawl it would be a nightmare trying to form a pickup group. But in holding candy out to the priests they've rather eclipsed two of the hybrids. I don't want to see priests nerfed. But I do think that paladins and druids are entitled to a buff