Eruend 0 Report post Posted October 30, 2014 (edited) Heya, just came back from a looong hiatus and while trying to re-learn the game, I've come across a puzzling change in the game. The specializations. At first, I thought I understood what they were, simply a replacement to the age old tallent tree, giving off most of the same benefits in a more simplified manner. Then I went and made a druid. The fact it has 4 specs threw me through a loop. After some observation of the Feral spec, I've noted that I still have all the spells I would have obtained from going into Guardian spec. This just leads me to question the worth of having these two specs separately. Is there some hidden benefit to picking one over the other, or are they just that redundant? And if they are the same, why did they bother with splitting them up? For easier matchmaking? That's all I can think of for now. Can't seem to find any information about this and so I defer to you guys. I would really like to hear more about this. "edit" After finally realizing I could just dual spec to have them both and compare, I realized that stat wise, the Guardian spec offers a little bit more health whereas the feral spec gives off much better offense. Several passives change to suit their respective forms and I also found that both specs have difrent tallents availeable, though I've not finished reading the Guardian's. Edited October 30, 2014 by Eruend Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Kazistrasz 216 Report post Posted October 30, 2014 Feral is for melee DPS, and Guardian is for tanking. Once upon a time, there were only three specs: resto, boomy, and feral. Feral could either be tank or melee depending upon which talents you picked in the tree. The problem was it lead to a lack of true specialization - the difference between the two specs was very minor, less than 10 (I think only 5) points were spent differently out of the full 71 in the WotLK talent trees, and only 3-5 spent differently in the Cata talent trees. This meant that at any point a bear druid could shift out of bear, into cat form, and do about 90% of the damage a dedicated kitty could do, and a kitty druid could shift out into bear form and start tanking almost as well as a dedicated bear. In MoP, they split the tanking aspect off into its own spec, guardian. They have a lot of the same core abilities, but then so do a lot of specs in different classes. What really chances is how the abilities work, the procs, the passives, etc. And, of course, the talent choices. They absolutely shouldn't combine them again, because we'd run into that same issue. They'd have to make the combined feral spec do shit for damage, or have all the resiliency tanking of a piece of wet cardboard. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tarazet 144 Report post Posted October 30, 2014 They split it up to keep the same player from being able to tank the boss for a while, then switch over and do DPS that was competitive with a good DPS.. which is what you saw with bearcats particularly in Cataclysm. But it's not something that selectively hurt us; Protection Paladins can no longer borrow talents from Retribution, either. And it didn't stop me from bearcatting anyway. I loved my Heart of the Wild cat burst, RIP in 6.0! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
