If you have PvP epic set and the AV Pigs head as weapon + some nice rings, trinkets and neck.

Whats next gear to go for? Grand Marshal (aka Mission Impossible) or what?

Im a full feral druid that dont like to spend 5hrs healing in a raid so you can count out the instances like AQ, MC, ZG. I dont want anything to do with healing basicly. So I cant go on raids, no guild wants feral druids in raids to go dps.

Have I reached the max limit of feral druids? Should I just grind the BG´s for honor points and wait for the burning crusade, maybe then feral druids will be allowed to go dps in end-game raids.

Suggestions/Ideas are appreciated =)

Roll a rogue. Any good druid knows when its better to heal and when its better to dps. Oh, and my guild lets me DPS in all the instances, but come boss fights, I heal. Frankly, I dont care because I dont need an epeen from dmg meters.

I dont have the patience or will to roll a new char, i got 1 other char (hunter) lvl60 but I dont find it any fun to play with him.

Your druid isnt called Illorath is he? btw what realm do you play on?

I´d like to play the end-game ins as dps and I could think of healing at bosses. But on my server there is no guild that allows that.

Any honor you grind now will get wiped when the new system gets put in place.

I would recommend looking at some of the epic rewards from Argent Dawn or Cenarion Rep and seeing if there is anything that interests you. For the symbols of Unending Life Set from Cenarion you can grind all the rep you need in Silithus (and get the Battlegear epics) but you will need to do a couple of trips into AQ20 for the BoP item for each piece. (Usually not hard to find a group looking to fill a spot on my server)

Quest XP for Gold

If you're waiting for the expansion, Find those quests that you never finished. I haven't played my priest in a good 6 months. Last night my buddies wanted to do the silithus quests leading up to "the calling". I grabbed all the quests in Cenarion Hold and headed out. When I was done, 68 gold.

9:30 pm - 11:30 pm = 68g, quest rewards that DE'd into GEEs, and some greens for AH.

Not too shabby

Roll a rogue. Any good druid knows when its better to heal and when its better to dps. Oh, and my guild lets me DPS in all the instances, but come boss fights, I heal. Frankly, I dont care because I dont need an epeen from dmg meters.

Any good druid also knows when it is better to not heal and better to tank. Really now. As I Druid you can Tank, DPS and Heal. It has nothing to do with Dmg Meters. If your guild does not have enough healers for you to DPS/Tank as a feral druid, they need to get more healers. If you are willing to help out and heal when the raid is short healers and switch back to DPS/Tank when there are enough healers the guild will love you and want you in your feral forms.

I really hate the meters in general, especially when they average out over a full raid.

As a balance resto hybrid, I heal very well in some fights and when healing is well covered I contribute to dps. As a result I am never as high on the healing meters as someone that is constantly trying to squeeze heals in, even where they may not be necessary, and of course I am not even close on any dmage meters (although I think I do ok an some fights where I really focus on it).

eters don't measure quality, a player that knows when it is best for the group to do something particular. A rogue that never backs off to bandage might do better on the dps meter, but at the expense of soaking up much more of the healing mana that could be going to tanks, etc...

Knowing when to use our key abilities like Battle rezzes and innervates, and knowing what abilities will be of the greatest benefit to the raid at any time (dps, healing, tanking) are what make druids great.

For instance if your main priest is getting beat on by an add, do you try to heal the priest, try to kill the add, or try to tank the add off the priest, the answer will depend on the situation, but your choosing the correct answer will never be reflected on a damage or health meter.

From the sounds of it, BC will give feral druids with mangle a chance to DPS in a guild. With a 25 man limit in the newer instances, a versatile class will have to take on more roles than ever before. Hmm, although refusing to heal when needed, guilds are probably better off picking a rogue over an unruly druid.

Hmm, my guild has been using SW STAT for tracking statistics. We all sync to a channel, and the statistics usually get reset before a major fight. It's pretty accurate... although it takes a good amount of resources to run.

Being feral DPS has nothing to do with epeen or DMG meters. It means you like the feral part of the druid most and have most fun playing feral.

And we all play for fun, right?

As I've said before.. stand strong my feral brother! Hopefully in BC ferals will be more attractive to high-end guilds. Ferals CAN DPS.. I out-DPS'd our 1337 rogues TWICE at nefarian (with much luck from OOC mind you). :)

But, as said.. refusing to heal and only DPS:ing in catform is stupid tbh, all sane guilds will more likely take a rogue if you only want to DPS.

we do, but most of the time in order to get the gear/exp/experience we want we have to use our different forms. The game is built on mechanics...each class needs the others to make it through the end-games. If we only played what we LIKED all the time, we would find ourselves sitting on the bench. A guild wants participation for success and unfortunately they take a FUN game and turn it into a J.O.B.
I also don't like paying my taxes....

Anyhoo goa, I too am full feral and love it that way...but my guild has called on me several times to be MH. I go, and the last couple of instances have been FANTASTIC. No other leather wearers in the group means MAD LOOT for me...had to have others carry some of my BOE since all my 16 slotters were bulging! So I healed and got Sweet rewards for my efforts.

FERAL FTW

Anyhoo goa, I too am full feral and love it that way...but my guild has called on me several times to be MH. I go, and the last couple of instances have been FANTASTIC. No other leather wearers in the group means MAD LOOT for me...had to have others carry some of my BOE since all my 16 slotters were bulging! So I healed and got Sweet rewards for my efforts.

FERAL FTW

Ya sure, I was mostly healer at bosses in BWL and AQ40.. only was feral DPS on trashmobs and sometimes on bosses (depending on raid setup). I have no problem being a healer, as long as it's not the prime thing they want me there for.

At MC I was all feral all the time before we stopped playing MC just to speed up the process. XD

Feral FTW indeed. :)

Thx for all the great tips guys. Think ill go to silithus and get the battlegear epics.

Why would they wipe the honor points in expansion? Is that official or just some rumour? Makes no sense to me.

Also about the farming gold suggestion, im at 2,6k gold atm so im good in the gold department =). And no its not bought with real money, ive just sold alot of rare stuff on AH. Alot of moonfairy decks among others.

I never said I refuse to heal at all, i just dont wanna do that only. I wanna play different roles, not a damn healer for 5-6hrs straight. I picked druid for the different roles he can take on, all classes with healing spells are put in one folder, healbot or we dont need you.

The majority judges ppl by the dmgmeters, even healingmeters which is the most retarded thing to measure.

Ive just had the worst luck in picking guilds, always end up in some that the Class officer druids are totally brainwashed healbots and +healing spell junkies that dont have any respect for people that arent full resto. Im currently in a PvP guild that just does premades.

Then find a guild that lets you play the way you want. You can still run instances, just when they ask you to heal, heal. Like you said: "I picked druid for the different roles he can take on" Well healing is something only 3 classes per faction can do, and a druid can do it rather well.

That doesnt mean you are a healbot. Heal one run, DPS the next...or maybe DPS trash, and heal boss fights. Whatever, just understand that anything you do in an instance is getting you access to the better gear your looking for. So you could suck it up and heal, and a month or two down the road have some amazing feral gear. Or..you could just be stubborn.

I can assure you that there are guilds out there that let spec how you want and enjoy the game. Im in one.

P.S. - No, my character name is Lorath and I play on Firetree(Horde).

To respond as a druid class leader / officer for my guild, I dont care how people spec, but I do ask my druids to heal. Main reason, as Lorath said, there are only 3 classes that can heal, and generally the more healers the smoother things go.
Further, I don't know more than one druid that wouldn't love to just DPS like mad. Same with Priests. Every priest that I know wants to be shadow. Same with Pallies.

y problem is that it's not really fair to let some people dps and others not. We learned this the hard way. Druid X went into catform cause we had enough healers, and all of a sudden 2 other druids went into cat form and 1 went into moonkin, leaving us with 1 druid (me) and 3 priests healing (yeah, we usually have more druids than priests on our raids). All of a sudden I had people whispering me saying "WTF he can go feral, I am too." Then shortly after that, some rogues died, and I had people whispering / saying in raid chat / saying in ochat "WTF arent the druids healing for? Now we have to slow down to rez, etc".

I have mad love for feral - leveled heavy feral (somethign like 1/34/5), and see no problem with dps'ing on trash... maybe the problem is that people are immature, or selfish, or just don't put the good of the guild over their personal desires, I'm not sure. But a lack of consistency is tough to deal with from a leadership standpoint without coming across as a complete and total D!CK. No one likes a hypocrit.

Same thing came up with assigning innervates to priests when trying new boss fights **edit: Should have clarified this was quite some ago, when only resto's had innv**. I've completley given up on asking druids to innervate, instead diverting my efforts to teaching priests to conserve mana and not use us as a crutch. Telling anyone what to do with their class sucks, but it's necessary to progress endgame and get the sick gear that is so desired. Just my 2c.

Huh... my guild's like complete opposite from that, Clari... we have 6 druids that regularly raid with us (and only 3 priests, same problem there xD), so we're generally druid heavy too, but out of the 6 of us, 2 are oomkin, 3 are resto and seem to actually enjoy it/have no desire to switch, and then there's me, the only feral. I'm not quite sure WHY I'm the only feral, it boggles me honestly, but I can't say I'm complaining. :)

And yeah, all 3 of us that aren't resto are more than happy to heal when need be... the oomkins are usually required to heal on bosses, though they can DPS on trash, sometimes on bosses if we're good on healing. I uh, well, I started out healing on bosses, but the more I get a chance to tank (cause of lack of warriors and them having DPS specs and whatnot), the less they have me heal coincidentally. >.>;; I finally got my shot at being MT1 for a full ZG run the other day, had a blast, and uh ever since then they've never needed me to heal, I always switch between offtanking/DPS as I see fit. I even got to claw up ony's back paw the other night when we downed her for the first time, I was amazed. xD

So yeah... ferals are viable in raiding, especially in 20 mans... don't think that there's no way you can get in a good guild that lets you. I would encourage you to at least try and look around. The most important thing I'd say is to be willing to be versatile... you might end up healing at first, but in time your guildies just may give you a chance when they see how versatile you can be. And getting into a naxx guild as a feral and expecting to DPS... well, duh, that might be pretty hard, just try and be wise there. Remember that come BC, naxx gear etc. isn't as uber as it is now, so even if you get a chance to run ZG/AQ/MC or beyond as a feral but not naxx persay... I'd go for it, but maybe that's just me. :) I wouldn't trade any amount of naxx epics for my guild.

In my raiding guild we usually have perfect balance (5 of every class). I know of one priest that is actually specced shadow, one moonkin, and one feral tank. On new content, nearly everyone heals (except the tank, because of his incredible gear he often out tanks our prot warriors). Our feral tank is incredible, and tanked every boss encounter as we learned BWL, including Chromag (warriors tank Nef).

No one is really trying to join the feral, since we know we can't compare gear wise, and we want druids on the whole to look good, and he does that for us. The moonkin and shadow priest are very considerate about asking the leaders whether a particular fight allows them to dps or not.

As for innervates, they are not assigned. It is left to the druids to decide who really needs them and will do the most with them. Basically three of our priests are really top notch and end up getting most of the innervates. We only had to make a macro to announce who was getting it so we don't overlap.

Ive respecced to full resto 44 points =D

Feels like starting a whole new char, thats the beauty of druids.

y gear is mix of tier .5, rank 8 pvp set and AV exalted. Had a retard friend while back that deleted my half tier 1 healing gear, after that incident I went full feral.

This respecceing to full resto has got me interested in wow again, was quite bored with it. Had done all the BG´s 1000 times. Looking forward to doing MC/AQ/ZG/BWL again.

Funny thing how people treat a full resto compared to full feral druid...its like day and night.

just out of curiosity how can they see the difference, if you haven't got leader of the pack?
i have a 30/21 build and they never spot that i am more feral then resto unless i tell them

Well if they´re really hardcore then can ask you to do swiftmend

or just don't put the good of the guild over their personal desires

I don't understand this logic. Honestly I don't. Why on earth is it ok to force someone to play a computer game in a way he doesn't like just to please others? And if this guy doesn't like it, he's selfish and immature!?

Oh well, I've gone over to my rogue as my main now anyway so no more useless guild rules for me now. I'll just DPS now. :texla:

Its like sheep mentality. Those that arent forced to anything dont give a jack about forcing others, they just dont care.

You can blaim alot of different things, the people themselves for not respecting non-resto druids or blizzard them selves for making the druid and the tier 1,2,3 gear only healing specific and nothing else.

I don't understand this logic. Honestly I don't. Why on earth is it ok to force someone to play a computer game in a way he doesn't like just to please others? And if this guy doesn't like it, he's selfish and immature!?

No one is forcing anyone to do anything. Just asking politley that they act in the best interest of the 39 other people that are there to help them get gear for the few hours that the raid lasts. The selfish comment is due to the "im here and going to do what I want with disregard to everyone else and you are all here to help ME get lewts" mentality. I dont think that guild rules are useless, they are there for a reason. Instances that are on farm status, no problem, do what you want. But for the learning process, yes, rules help. IMO. /flame if you will.

Ok now for an analogy... so say someone joins a football team that needs a wide receiver. But he refuses to play receiver even though he is really fast and has great hands cause he wants to play quarterback. And there are already 4 or 5 other quarterbacks on the team that are better than him. Would it be in the best interest of the team to have a 5th or 6th string quarterback, or another receiver? Assuming that the goal of the team is to win.

As is, in our BWL learning curve, everyone that can heal is really happy to do so. And because everyone has innervate, its very acceptable to innervate yourself, though if one of our main priests asks for one over Vent, people are more than willing to throw them one.

ATM in MC, no one cares what anyone does anymore (as long as it's not stupid). I was speaking of a situation that arose quite some time ago in the learning process when we were all still in greens and fresh from 20-mans and had no idea how to raid. If you want to go feral in a raid situation, it would be probably best to jump in with a guild that has that areas on Farm, but be prepared to help out with healing in the new content that they are learning. Thats all I'm saying

3 are resto and seem to actually enjoy it/have no desire to switch, and then there's me, the only feral. I'm not quite sure WHY I'm the only feral, it boggles me honestly, but I can't say I'm complaining. :)

Cool. I respec'd 36 resto 15 feral some time ago, and actually Love it. I still have feral charge and some other useful feral talents, and can heal forever. I really like healing personally, and enjoy the responsibility of healing.

And yeah, all 3 of us that aren't resto are more than happy to heal when need be... the oomkins are usually required to heal on bosses, though they can DPS on trash, sometimes on bosses if we're good on healing.

Thats how things should be, and how we currently are. I was throwing out a worst case scenario that my guild ran into when we first started raiding months and months ago.

I finally got my shot at being MT1 for a full ZG run the other day, had a blast, and uh ever since then they've never needed me to heal, I always switch between offtanking/DPS as I see fit. I even got to claw up ony's back paw the other night when we downed her for the first time, I was amazed. xD

Grats on the full tank of ZG! Super fun. One of the most fun times I've had recently was tanking the first boss in AQ20. Then we took down the second boss who cant really be tanked, just kited, and had to call it. But it was such a thrill to tank in AQ20. Nice to be at a point where your guild doesn't need you to heal. I love it when were stocked on healers... those runs are the best cause everyone is basically doing what they want.

So yeah... ferals are viable in raiding, especially in 20 mans... don't think that there's no way you can get in a good guild that lets you. I would encourage you to at least try and look around. The most important thing I'd say is to be willing to be versatile...

Exactly. Just gotta make sure everyone is on the same page so to speak. Its all about building trust with the guild, and finding a balance. Ferals with LOTP are very viable for raiding, esp thrown in with a rogue group. Same with moonies in mage / lock groups. Basically just have fun. If healing isn't fun for you, and you can't find a guild that will let you only tank or dps, then maybe raiding isn't where its at. Most guilds will let you dps or ask you to off tank at one time or another (we went like 2 months short on warriors, so we had a druid or two tank the dogs on the way up to Mag), but will also expect you to pitch in and heal at times too, especially when learning new stuff.

No one is forcing anyone to do anything. Just asking politley that they act in the best interest of the 39 other people that are there to help them get gear for the few hours that the raid lasts. The selfish comment is due to the "im here and going to do what I want with disregard to everyone else and you are all here to help ME get lewts" mentality. I dont think that guild rules are useless, they are there for a reason. Instances that are on farm status, no problem, do what you want. But for the learning process, yes, rules help. IMO. /flame if you will.

Not arguing with you. Ofc a feral is better as a healer at times. But going in to a raid setup expecting the ferals to heal all the time is not ok. They are feral after all. Get more healers in your setup if you are lacking healing.

But going in to a raid setup expecting the ferals to heal all the time is not ok. They are feral after all. Get more healers in your setup if you are lacking healing.

Yeah, that's exaclty how my raid leaders are looking at it now. I used to have to heal quite a bit, but the more I raid feral, the more they want me to stay in feral forms, so if we're short on healers, even if I offer "I'll heal if you need me to", they'll generally hit LFG first, and see if they can get any extra healers. It surprised me at first when they strated hitting LFG for healers when I'm sitting right there in the warrior group, but I really do appreciate it. I'm like... emergency emergency backup healing, there's very few fights where I heal anymore. I have a neat little hybrid healer/tank gear set set up for fights like Rajaxx in AQ20 where I offtank during first part, help our healers heal the Lieautentant dude in the last part. That works pretty well.

I agree goa that it isn't ok to ask ferals to heal all the time. Its super nice when we have all our dedicated healers show up so the dedicated ferals can do their thing. Sucks when the main's cant show up cause of RL or something, and the ferals have to pick up slack. Though they do a great job at it.

LFG'ing is cool for the 20 mans where stuff is free-rolled on, but for 40 mans we almost always go guild only, cause of DKP and stuff. I actually ran all of ZG on my priest in shadow form once, keeping imp VE healing going on the rogues that I was grouped with. We did it kind of as an experiment, and it worked really well. That was fun. Hoping to do it again sometime.

Yeah, that's exaclty how my raid leaders are looking at it now. I used to have to heal quite a bit, but the more I raid feral, the more they want me to stay in feral forms, so if we're short on healers, even if I offer "I'll heal if you need me to", they'll generally hit LFG first, and see if they can get any extra healers.

You should take that as a PHAT good evaluation. I mean, If they want you to stay feral and rather take randoms as healing because they need your "feralness" you are obvuiously doing a good job as feral, and they appreciate it. =)

You should stay with that guild imo. Too many end game guilds frown and laugh at ferals. :(

I agree goa that it isn't ok to ask ferals to heal all the time. Its super nice when we have all our dedicated healers show up so the dedicated ferals can do their thing. Sucks when the main's cant show up cause of RL or something, and the ferals have to pick up slack. Though they do a great job at it.

LFG'ing is cool for the 20 mans where stuff is free-rolled on, but for 40 mans we almost always go guild only, cause of DKP and stuff. I actually ran all of ZG on my priest in shadow form once, keeping imp VE healing going on the rogues that I was grouped with. We did it kind of as an experiment, and it worked really well. That was fun. Hoping to do it again sometime.

Too many guilds has the mentality "lookie - the healer can DPS a bit", instead of thinking "lookie - the DPS:er can heal if needs be".

I LOVE off-healing in raids when all hope is lost. You always get nice comments afterwards from the rogues like "nice combatrez there, sometimes I wish I could do that sh*t" or "Zoomg, that tranquility really saved our asses" etc..

A feral is primary a DPs:er or tank.. healing is second. =) My best time as a feral was when I was in the DPS-team in BWL and we had our own little chat-channel.. all the rogues LOVED me. Sure, I wasn't as good at dishing out pure damage as they were, but I liked to keep an eye out for them and be the sugar-daddy. =) And from time to time (if you got lucky at OOC) you could really dominate the damage meters ASWELL as innervating/combatrezzing.

That's what feral hybrid DPS is for me. =)

Shoot me. I just liked that role most. :D

I just have to say a big "I AGREE!" to goa here. It's nice to see some people getting it right, and actually managing to convince their guilds too (it took me over half a year :-s).

What benefits my guild most, is me tanking. I'm a much better tank than I am a healer. Any druid that says "sorry I'm feral -- can't heal" should be tossed out of the raid immediately. OTOH, any raid leader that says "you're a druid -- you should only heal" don't deserve druids.

In my opinion, druids focus in one of five areas -- healing, tanking, melee dps, caster dps, or hybrid (the realm of shamans and paladins that don't specialise). While we're not as versatile in each role, our strength is that we can switch role from fight to fight. While I tank at Vael and Broodlord, I do dps at Flamegor. I tank again at Ebonroc and Flamegor, and go a bit hybrid (kitty and decurse/depoison) at Chromaggus, etc. I might not have the versatility of a warrior prot tank when tanking, but let's see him/her match the rest of my abilities when the raid leader needs it.