Well, the Druid class preview hit about a week ago, and I was quite giddy with anticipation. I don't think I'd been that excited since the Burning Crusade class preview (Wrath's was rather boring for a feral soloist. A healing spell and a raid finisher? Yawn.) That was until I read this little tidbit:
Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.
The druid community has been in quite an uproar since this was announced, with calls of "Save the trees!" appearing everywhere, even though about a year ago, it appeared the druid community was split 50/50 between people who liked Tree of Life and people who didn't. Still, such a radical change certainly deserves some scrutiny. For the record, in spite of what the announcement said, this is not an issue of mechanics. There is no reason that any of the bonuses we get in tree form can't be baked into the other resto talents. This is also not a matter of druids lacking an emergency healing ability (Nature's Swiftness is rather underwhelming), since we can always be given one, or they could improve Nature's Swiftness. No, at its heart, this issue is one thing and one thing only: cosmetic. Should healing druids be trees at all times, or should they be able to be in their caster form?
I already touched upon this issue a bit in my take on "The disappearance of the bear", so here are the bits from that post that are relevant to our current issue:
"WoW is a very visual game, but I am surprised that players actually have time to look at their characters during raids... I suppose I am biased in this issue, since any dedicated druid will have long given up on their forms being as cool as other people's armor. Like I said, though, time spent in combat leaves little time for admiring your character's shiny gear, and if you really want to see the gear, you can spend time out of combat in caster form... Armor is cool, but there is plenty of time for admiring it when you are going from place to place on a mount or waiting between a wipe and the next pull. These times are much more appropriate for thinking about how cool your armor is than during battle..."
With that said, I would also like to address the point brought up by Blizzard that "it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time." Any druid will tell you that anyone who rolled a druid hoping to admire their armor while in combat picked the wrong class to play. Druids are masters of shapeshifting, and our shifting allows us to visually make a statement about what we will be doing. We don't shapeshift to give ourselves a temporary boost; we shapeshift because that is what we druids do. To have one spec not fit that mold just for the sake of letting us look at our armor (which, as I already mentioned, is a point I don't give much credit to) seems to be an unnecessary break from that design. After all, Moonkin Form is similar to Tree of Life in terms of its necessity by game standards, yet it is staying as a permanent form. Why change Tree of Life?
Now, I know people reading this are probably thinking that I am just suffering from a case of reactionary "They changed it now it sucks" thinking, but that shouldn't surprise you. Since this issue is a completely visual one, it's one that cannot be decided easily by rational thinking and is better decided by emotion. I know Blizzard has said that Tree of Life has become more and more of a visual spell and made less of a difference in our play-style, but the same can be said of Moonkin form. I'd much rather Blizzard address the issues that Tree of Life has (constriction of our spell arsenal, lack-luster model) than scrap it and only make us use it every once in a while. I ask, why change tree form? Why change that which is so fundamental to the class without changing it universally across all of our specs? Why make restoration the exception? This change is simply without merit.
I think Big Bear Butt said it best: "I know that Ghostcrawler seems to feel that the Treeform mechanic doesn’t add anything to the game, it doesn’t bring anything special to the Restoration Druid’s table. It does. What it brings is Treeform itself. What he just doesn’t seem to grasp is that Treeform, for a Restoration Druid, is a goal in and of itself. Not something to be pity Glyphed, but an outwards symbol of a Druid Healer’s resolve." [source]
Showing posts with label druid forms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label druid forms. Show all posts
Friday, April 16, 2010
Monday, August 24, 2009
How Blizzard could make shifting more attractive for druids
One of the things Blizzard revealed with the druid class Q&A was that they want to make shifting more attractive for druids. Currently, we druids spend most of our time in or respective shapeshifting forms rather than in our caster form, so we rarely get to see our armor or take advantage of our class's hybrid nature. It seems the Blizzard wanted to start doing this immediately, as we can see with one of the changes coming in patch 3.2.2.
Predatory Strikes: This talent now also causes the druid's finishing moves to provide a 7/13/20% chance per combo point to make the next Nature spell with a cast time below 10 seconds instant cast.
This means that cats will at least have the chance to see their caster forms more often, with each finishing move allowing the use of an instant healing touch or regrowth or maybe even rebirth. I could see other such changes to make shifting out of our forms an attractive option. A similar talent for bear form could look something like this:
Protector of the Pack: This talent now also causes barkskin to allow you to retain bear form's damage reduction, armor and stamina increase, threat increase, and all other benefits of being in bear form for 33/66/100% of its duration if you leave bear form.
This would allow a tank to leave bear form and heal his allies or use a crowd control spell, without him loosing his increased defenses. Admittedly, a druid using this kind of ability would probably cause less threat with his spells than he would with by staying in bear form, but the goal here is simply more utility. I'd probably use an ability like this to throw down tranquility when the going gets tough. Your healer would love you for that.
Although it would be easy to suggest using similar talents to motivate druids to leave moonkin and tree form, the fact is that most balance druids have no real reason to leave moonkin form, and most resto druids have no real reason to leave tree form. Sure, a moonkin could cast the occasional side heal, and a tree may need to use cyclone in an emergency, but for the most part, there's little reason to make caster druids leave their forms aside from simply doing it for its sake. Feral druids do need to shift out to heal, so such talents are useful to us, but they wouldn't be as useful to casters.
This only applies to PvE, though. In PvP, it's a different story. A moonkin fighting on his own can only count on himself for heals, and a tree needs to use his defensive spells to stay alive. Thus, in PvP, pretty much all druids have a reason to shift out of their forms already, and the change to predatory instincts will simply make it easier for feral druids. Perhaps moonkin and trees could get a talent reducing the cast time of their restoration and balance spells, respectively, by 50% after they leave their forms. Aside from that, I think that casters are all set in the see-their-forms department when it comes to PvP.
Like I said, though, in PvE, there is very little real motivation for caster druids to leave their forms currently, so Blizzard would need to create that motivation, and doing so without nerfing the forms themselves would be quite difficult. One of my initial thoughts on a way Blizzard could motivate casters to leave their forms without nerfing the forms themselves was to give casters a buff to their forms that contrasts the benefits of moonkin/tree form. The problem with that idea is that both forms increase damage/healing and either reduce the mana cost of spells or have a way of giving the druid mana back. Thus there isn't much that the two forms don't currently offer druids who use them.
Truly, the only drawback of moonkin/tree form is that they don't allow the use of most restoration/balance spells, respectively, but in a PvE environment, this is not a cause for concern. Unless this simple fact changes, caster druids will be forced to stay in their forms unless Blizzard can somehow change druids fundamentally.
Predatory Strikes: This talent now also causes the druid's finishing moves to provide a 7/13/20% chance per combo point to make the next Nature spell with a cast time below 10 seconds instant cast.
This means that cats will at least have the chance to see their caster forms more often, with each finishing move allowing the use of an instant healing touch or regrowth or maybe even rebirth. I could see other such changes to make shifting out of our forms an attractive option. A similar talent for bear form could look something like this:
Protector of the Pack: This talent now also causes barkskin to allow you to retain bear form's damage reduction, armor and stamina increase, threat increase, and all other benefits of being in bear form for 33/66/100% of its duration if you leave bear form.
This would allow a tank to leave bear form and heal his allies or use a crowd control spell, without him loosing his increased defenses. Admittedly, a druid using this kind of ability would probably cause less threat with his spells than he would with by staying in bear form, but the goal here is simply more utility. I'd probably use an ability like this to throw down tranquility when the going gets tough. Your healer would love you for that.
Although it would be easy to suggest using similar talents to motivate druids to leave moonkin and tree form, the fact is that most balance druids have no real reason to leave moonkin form, and most resto druids have no real reason to leave tree form. Sure, a moonkin could cast the occasional side heal, and a tree may need to use cyclone in an emergency, but for the most part, there's little reason to make caster druids leave their forms aside from simply doing it for its sake. Feral druids do need to shift out to heal, so such talents are useful to us, but they wouldn't be as useful to casters.
This only applies to PvE, though. In PvP, it's a different story. A moonkin fighting on his own can only count on himself for heals, and a tree needs to use his defensive spells to stay alive. Thus, in PvP, pretty much all druids have a reason to shift out of their forms already, and the change to predatory instincts will simply make it easier for feral druids. Perhaps moonkin and trees could get a talent reducing the cast time of their restoration and balance spells, respectively, by 50% after they leave their forms. Aside from that, I think that casters are all set in the see-their-forms department when it comes to PvP.
Like I said, though, in PvE, there is very little real motivation for caster druids to leave their forms currently, so Blizzard would need to create that motivation, and doing so without nerfing the forms themselves would be quite difficult. One of my initial thoughts on a way Blizzard could motivate casters to leave their forms without nerfing the forms themselves was to give casters a buff to their forms that contrasts the benefits of moonkin/tree form. The problem with that idea is that both forms increase damage/healing and either reduce the mana cost of spells or have a way of giving the druid mana back. Thus there isn't much that the two forms don't currently offer druids who use them.
Truly, the only drawback of moonkin/tree form is that they don't allow the use of most restoration/balance spells, respectively, but in a PvE environment, this is not a cause for concern. Unless this simple fact changes, caster druids will be forced to stay in their forms unless Blizzard can somehow change druids fundamentally.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Ideas on how to make the new cat/bear forms scale with gear
One of the biggest complaints of the druid community has been that, while everyone else gets to see their characters look more and more awesome as they progress through content, us druids are left looking at the same old animal forms. It wasn't too bad back in the days of vanilla WoW, when the only way druids could contribute to raids was to heal and Tree of Life didn't exist. Since we spent all our time healing, we spent all our time in caster form, so we got to see our armor change like everyone else. Fast forward to BC, and there was a shapeshifting form for every spec. Sure, there were Dreamstate healers who healed in caster form with healing touch, but for the most part, every druid spent most of his or her time in a shapeshifting form. It was here that boredom began to creep in, as everyone was getting decked out in their T4, 5, and 6 armor and we looked exactly as we had since level 10/20/40/50 (bear/cat/moonkin/tree, respectively).
The new forms that we are getting in patch 3.2 will certainly help to alleviate our boredom with our current forms, but Blizzard still has not unveiled any plans to make our forms change as we get better armor. Some may question the necessity of such a system, but I doubt that there are many non-druids out there who would be happy with their armor never changing on a cosmetic level. If they get to see their character become progressively more cool as they get better armor, why shouldn't we?
There was an entry of wow.com's Shifting Perspectives column that detailed the issues that such a system would create. (I ♥ Allison Robert, by the way.) According to that post, there could only be two systems for druid forms to scale with gear: the first is that our forms would improve as we got better gear (or from some other indicator), and they would continue to improve as our gear got better, getting more and more cool as we went through the various expansions. The other system is that we would start over with the most basic versions of our forms every time an expansion came out, meaning if you had all best-in-slot gear and had the best druid form, when the next expansion came out, you would start from square one. The first system presents the problem of creating more work for the art department. It also presents the issue of how the art department can keep expanding on our forms. To paraphrase the article, after they've added as many symbols as they can, how else will they change our forms? Adding more bands? gems? tufts of hair? rockets? As for the second option, if we simply started over with our most basic form every time we started a new expansion, druids would eventually get tired of progressing through the same cycle of changes to our forms.
So how can we scale our forms with our gear? How can we druids show off just how phat our loot really is? I personally think that the idea of coming up with a new set of druid form artwork with each expansion isn't that bad of an idea. (Sorry, Allison.) That said, I don't think they should completely revamp our forms with each expansion. Rather, Blizzard could keep the basics like colors and models the same and simply change the details. Specifically, they could change the symbols above the front legs and the necklaces.
Currently, the symbols on bear form are a circle with a dot in the middle and an arc under it. It is the same on cat form minus the circle. I think that cat and bears still leveling in Azeroth could keep this symbol, and new symbols could be given the druids who are mostly decked out in gear from one of the other continents. Perhaps a crack to represent Outland's fragmented structure and an ice crystal for the frozen wastes of Northrend. If the next expansion ends up being the Maelstrom as people suspect, we could get a whirlpool design. You may think that this kind of theme-based symbol design may be somewhat cliché, but since druids are masters of nature, it's not unreasonable to expect their forms to mimic the world they inhabit in some way.
(Edit: Since I wrote this, the next expansion has been confirmed to be taking place in a sundered Azeroth. A crack would probably better represent that level of gear than Outland gear.)
I also think the symbol could change color to reflect the quality of the gear the druid is wearing. Due to the eclectic nature of vanilla WoW gear, this may not be practicable for pre-60 druids, but once they get to Outland, I think this would be rather easy to implement. After all, in both Outland and Northrend, the lowest level blue-quality gear tends to be just a smidgen better than the equivalent highest-level green gear. Thus Blizzard could set up a scale by which the symbol gets brighter as the average ilevel of the druid's gear increases. The symbol could also change color as the druid moves from mostly greens to mostly blues to mostly purples. Since the same shade of green that would look good on the white cat model would probably not look good on the black cat model, Blizzard would probably need to come up with different shades of greens, blues, and purples for the different models. The symbols could change their design based on which level of content the majority of the druid's gear comes from: mostly Outland gear would be a crack, mostly Northrend gear would be an ice crystal. The symbol could also keep its brightness relative to the content it comes from, so someone in the best Outland gear possible would keep a bright purple crack until they upgrade to Northrend blues and get a blue ice crystal.
As for the necklaces, because they are a more subtle feature of the design, they could simply be designed after the kind of trinkets (in the sense of tchotchkes, not equipment) the druid would pick up in their respective continents. Perhaps burning legion paraphernalia in Outland or Vrykul artifacts in Northrend. The necklaces could then simply become more detailed as the average ilevel of the druid's gear increased. Perhaps more gems could be added or certain parts made bigger.
These are just some ideas. I do not think it would be very hard to implement something like this in the game. However, after looking at the same cat for at least three years, I'm happy with the changes we are getting and promise not to complain for at least another expansion pack.
The new forms that we are getting in patch 3.2 will certainly help to alleviate our boredom with our current forms, but Blizzard still has not unveiled any plans to make our forms change as we get better armor. Some may question the necessity of such a system, but I doubt that there are many non-druids out there who would be happy with their armor never changing on a cosmetic level. If they get to see their character become progressively more cool as they get better armor, why shouldn't we?
There was an entry of wow.com's Shifting Perspectives column that detailed the issues that such a system would create. (I ♥ Allison Robert, by the way.) According to that post, there could only be two systems for druid forms to scale with gear: the first is that our forms would improve as we got better gear (or from some other indicator), and they would continue to improve as our gear got better, getting more and more cool as we went through the various expansions. The other system is that we would start over with the most basic versions of our forms every time an expansion came out, meaning if you had all best-in-slot gear and had the best druid form, when the next expansion came out, you would start from square one. The first system presents the problem of creating more work for the art department. It also presents the issue of how the art department can keep expanding on our forms. To paraphrase the article, after they've added as many symbols as they can, how else will they change our forms? Adding more bands? gems? tufts of hair? rockets? As for the second option, if we simply started over with our most basic form every time we started a new expansion, druids would eventually get tired of progressing through the same cycle of changes to our forms.
So how can we scale our forms with our gear? How can we druids show off just how phat our loot really is? I personally think that the idea of coming up with a new set of druid form artwork with each expansion isn't that bad of an idea. (Sorry, Allison.) That said, I don't think they should completely revamp our forms with each expansion. Rather, Blizzard could keep the basics like colors and models the same and simply change the details. Specifically, they could change the symbols above the front legs and the necklaces.
Currently, the symbols on bear form are a circle with a dot in the middle and an arc under it. It is the same on cat form minus the circle. I think that cat and bears still leveling in Azeroth could keep this symbol, and new symbols could be given the druids who are mostly decked out in gear from one of the other continents. Perhaps a crack to represent Outland's fragmented structure and an ice crystal for the frozen wastes of Northrend. If the next expansion ends up being the Maelstrom as people suspect, we could get a whirlpool design. You may think that this kind of theme-based symbol design may be somewhat cliché, but since druids are masters of nature, it's not unreasonable to expect their forms to mimic the world they inhabit in some way.
(Edit: Since I wrote this, the next expansion has been confirmed to be taking place in a sundered Azeroth. A crack would probably better represent that level of gear than Outland gear.)
I also think the symbol could change color to reflect the quality of the gear the druid is wearing. Due to the eclectic nature of vanilla WoW gear, this may not be practicable for pre-60 druids, but once they get to Outland, I think this would be rather easy to implement. After all, in both Outland and Northrend, the lowest level blue-quality gear tends to be just a smidgen better than the equivalent highest-level green gear. Thus Blizzard could set up a scale by which the symbol gets brighter as the average ilevel of the druid's gear increases. The symbol could also change color as the druid moves from mostly greens to mostly blues to mostly purples. Since the same shade of green that would look good on the white cat model would probably not look good on the black cat model, Blizzard would probably need to come up with different shades of greens, blues, and purples for the different models. The symbols could change their design based on which level of content the majority of the druid's gear comes from: mostly Outland gear would be a crack, mostly Northrend gear would be an ice crystal. The symbol could also keep its brightness relative to the content it comes from, so someone in the best Outland gear possible would keep a bright purple crack until they upgrade to Northrend blues and get a blue ice crystal.
As for the necklaces, because they are a more subtle feature of the design, they could simply be designed after the kind of trinkets (in the sense of tchotchkes, not equipment) the druid would pick up in their respective continents. Perhaps burning legion paraphernalia in Outland or Vrykul artifacts in Northrend. The necklaces could then simply become more detailed as the average ilevel of the druid's gear increased. Perhaps more gems could be added or certain parts made bigger.
These are just some ideas. I do not think it would be very hard to implement something like this in the game. However, after looking at the same cat for at least three years, I'm happy with the changes we are getting and promise not to complain for at least another expansion pack.
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