druids-in-cataclysm
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Shifting Perspectives: Bear druids in patch 4.0.1
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, sum durids is bare. Unannounced changes on the most recent beta build: Female worgen have been redesigned and now bear a startling resemblance to Rachel Dratch. Nourish has a 50/100 percent chance to refresh the duration of Lifebloom on your target and causes Allison Robert to use the f-word six times in one sentence on the WoW Insider team line. Dave Kosak's stoner troll Gravy from Flintlocke vs. The Horde is now a bartender in Orgrimmar. Actually, that last part's a little misleading; I think our pal Gravy's been tending bar since the alpha. I found out about him a few builds ago and have been trying to sneak him into an article ever since. As a general note concerning tanking once patch 4.0.1 and then Cataclysm itself hit, I think we are very likely to see an instancing model reminiscent of the pre-3.0.2 world. I got my start as a 5-man tank in the dungeons and heroics of The Burning Crusade and was known as one of the few people on my server willing to tank Shattered Halls, Shadow Lab and Magisters' Terrace PUGs. As a result, I got very familiar with the need to mark mob packs, assign crowd controllers, use line of sight and tab targeting, and maintain situational awareness. I was equally familiar with the effect that an inexperienced or incompetent player could have on a group under those circumstances (particularly when said inexperienced or incompetent player was me). This is not an indictment of the more difficult instancing model to which Blizzard seems to be returning, because I've genuinely missed tough heroics. However, the dungeon finder is perhaps more suited to a world with greater margin for group error. Tanks are generally unwilling to confront instances requiring heavy crowd control when they don't know what kind of group they're going to get. Guild achievements and reputation are also oriented around guildies' instancing together. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the dungeon finder will become obsolete, but I'm reasonably certain that the wait for a tank is going to get longer. When CC is more of a concern, a tank's control over the dungeon's outcome is necessarily limited, and there are increasingly few incentives to ply your trade for a random group.
