Druid Epic/Legendary Item

[Zarathustra]

So, Zarathustra, sorry for the sidetracking your discussion.  What were your ideas for an epic/legendary druid weapon?
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I was thinking much of what's been touched upon already. I actually hadn't considered a Legendary item at all when I first started brainstorming the weapon.

My initial idea was to have a dual weapon akin to the Priest (and, at one time, Hunter) rewards. It would not be difficult to have one form aid casting while another was more feral focused. The casting form would be a staff with +dam/heal (to apply to both offensive casting and healing), hefty casting stats, and either some mana/5 or casting regen. I'd say when casting offensively, running out of mana is the biggest hurdle to overcome. An Evocation-type OnUse ability came to mind, but it occurred to me that this would be redundant with Innervate and terribly imbalanced. A Druid would never run out of mana with that weapon if they had 31 points in Restoration.

The Feral form of the weapon would serve both cat and bear forms, and maybe be a mace rather than a staff. Lots of strength and stamina, enough +Armor to surpass any current ingame options (Warden Staff & Unyielding Maul), some +crit, +defense, and maybe the new Feral Attack Power. It's bad enough that Druids already need two different sets of Feral gear in order to specialize well. I'd like to see the weapon be useful for each.

Considering the above, it came to me that Blizzard has even said publicly that they don't feel Druids are a "true" hybrid. They can perform multiple roles, but not all at once. With that in mind, I'd say a Legendary item combining both the above would work best. Since a Druid will never be using all of those abilities at one time, I see no problem with giving them an abundance of stats. The big barrier I see there is the Blizzard forums where some child would start screaming how unbalanced it is for a Druid to get a weapon giving a ton of attack power in forms AND serious caster stats.

I don't want to give up raw stats alltogether, but perhaps an effect that's only active in each form would be worth it. Just throwing ideas around, here's what I came up with in addition to any stat increases that are always active...

Cat & Bear Forms: Attack Power increase
Bear Form: Armor and Defense (there are VERY few options for +def in leather)
Cat Form: Threat reduction
Travel Form: +30% movement speed, making the Druid move at 170%, passing up a level 40 mount by 10%.
Moonkin: 15% mana regen while casting

There's little way I could justify purple text on any item that gave all those bonuses, regardless of the fact that they wouldn't all be active at once. If it'd have to be orange, so be it.

And as a staff, I'd give it a wound vine look like the hunter quest bow. Part of the quest would involve "planting" the seed of the staff in the ground. Going oldschool D&D with a living staff for a Druid.