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Shifting Perspectives: Leveling 51-60
Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we haul ourselves to Outland and are shocked to discover that +spellpower sometimes comes on leather.The above video is the result of an idle question I was asked recently by a friend: "So how much damage would you guys do in caster form meleeing?" I started to answer and then realized I had no idea. The notion of actually hitting something with a weapon is utterly foreign to the class. We have claws and a can of celestial pain for that nonsense if provoked, but still, the question was pretty interesting, particularly because after seeing Prinnygod's comment from last week I started to wonder about all the different ways you could level as a Druid if you deliberately avoided Cat and Moonkin. Sure, you'd be a gibbering wreck at the level cap, but that's beside the point. Blizzard once had a talent called Weapon Balance in the Balance tree that improved our melee damage with weapons by 10% -- they were expecting us to hit things. I wondered how that would have worked out if Druid talent trees had never been overhauled.So I took my main to the mobs outside the Argent Tournament and smacked stuff while running a stopwatch. What you'll see here is a level 79 Frostbrood Whelp with 12,600 health which took me 34.4 seconds to kill, with two global cooldowns devoted to casting a Rejuvenation and then a Lifebloom. I'm currently on a Feral (Bear) spec and thus wearing gear that does help one's melee damage, mind you, but that still works out to a godawful 366.28 DPS. The moral of our little story can be found at the end of the video. Master of Arms is going to be a real trip.
Flying the not-so-friendly skies
Gustav of Nazjatar started a long thread the other day about air kills (and many times, the lack thereof) in World PvP. These concerns got raised before the expansion, but I haven't heard too much about them since until now (maybe that's what I get for playing on a PvE server). Basically players are saying that when you get a flying mount at 70, you suddenly become immune to PvP-- because there's no way to pull people out of the air, a flying target is no target at all. And that, says Gustav, is yet another example of the "carebearization" (nice) of world PvP by Blizzard.The other issue Gustav has is an upcoming change that will make dead players' bodies fall to the ground after death, instead of remaining suspended there in the air like, as Drysc says, "a magic trick gone wrong." Blue's word on this one is that it's just not "natural" to leave players in the air-- Gustav thinks it's because Blizzard wanted to give people a break on repairs (because now, players left in the air have to rez at the spirit healer), but Drysc says it's just artistic-- let the bodies hit the floor, man.But Gustav's more interesting idea is that every class should have an anti-air ability-- a way to bring your PvP opponent out of the air. To my mind, that kind of thing just opens the door to griefing-- actual air-to-air combat seems like a better idea to me. Drysc's response to the news that PvPers are avoiding a fight by flying sounds about right: staying on a mount when someone below is taunting you just makes you chicken. If you're really interested in world PvP, then get off the mount-- it's time to drop down and throw down.
