Feeling the Heat from 8.1

[North]

Having some thoughts about my main for the rest of the expansion-would like yalls opinion as any change I make-could indeed affect the raid group-and further I just care about your opinion!

The concern. Since 8.0.1 and 8.1 Druids have seen significant changes-the healing provided by them has become rather niche-a niche that im worried is wasted on this guild comp and my amazing healing mates adrinna and Tsuni. (that niche being high damage healing in tranq-which was hit hard). My throughput is not so helpful with two holy priests (and even less when we 4 heal). My inability to spot hill is also concerning.

On the other hand-the class brings some nice utility (like mass entangle and ursol vortex) and some nice mobile healing for those specific bosses that may be missed.

The Options
1. My Holy paladin is generally 5-10 I levels below my druid-but acceptably geared as of late and ive been re-honing my skills with it-It would have much less throughput but great spot healing and passive tank healing with Beacons-I.E. dedicated tank healer? Some interesting utility in some extrat stuns-a shield or two-and the damage reduction aura.

2. Trying to recruit one of the other healing classes-mistweaver/resto sham/Disc and switching to one of my DPS classes-im proficient with my frost mage (would only take a week to catch gear up to an acceptable point) and could become proficient in Balance druid/Feral druid....in theory

what do you think? Would we miss the resto? Am I being Dramatic? Im not suggesting i am a blight on the team or anything (god atleast i hope not) rather just wondering if I could be contributing more in this sense. One day they might actually release the kul-tiran druid and that will be nice-but I doubt a change in racial passives will make any positive difference lol

Thanks for the feedback guildies i want to contribute best I can and I love this guild!

[draven]

greetings! i have two default responses to these sorts of questions:
1. play whatever character you prefer to play
2. when someone decides to switch characters i generally prefer them to do so between tiers, although we are probably close enough to the beginning of dazar'alor that it shouldn't matter much at the moment

this isn't a hardcore guild so i'd rather have people enjoy the character that they're playing rather than worry about an ideal group comp or that it would be better to have a resto druid for one situation and a holy pally for another. every class brings something to the raid, but trying to maintain multiple characters is not entirely fun these days.

that said, there are a couple issues with our current comp that are less than ideal. i would like to add another healer, most likely a paladin or shaman. however with the number of people we currently have it seems like three healers is generally sufficient most of the time but is problematic in certain situations, but having four healers is overkill except in those certain situations. the solution for that is to find more dps, which as usual is a work in progress.

tldr: you probably don't need to worry about it and you should play the character you want to

[North]

Thanks coach for the feedback,

Four healers is absolutely to many without another handful of members imo-that said-if we got another healer, id be willing and able to switch to balance pretty easy (unless of course one of the priests are dying to go shadow). The next time we run normal BODA-maybe I can try the pally out-see how it fits-I don't want to slow down progression on heroic or Jaina if it turns out to be a bad idea. Otherwise I can revisit the idea next raid Tier.

[renner]

I'm the new guy, so take this all with a grain of salt.

Draven hits the nail on the head:

play whatever character you prefer to play

That generally means whichever character/class is more "fun" for you, but fun can take on different meanings. Specifically, if you feel like the raid is not getting good bang for the buck from your druid, and that you'd feel better about bringing a different class, then I support that.

I'm gearing a protection warrior for exactly that reason (plus it lets me have a character on the Proudmoore server more easily). Paladin tanks are fine, and there's nothing at all wrong with having two, but I personally will feel a little better if I play a different tank and bring a little more variety to the tank team.

Edit: also more plate wearers is gooooood! XD