The Druid class preview has been announced! Click here for the full announcement.

Here’s a rundown of what’s been announced so far – remember this is just a taste of what is to come, not a full rundown of all druid changes. My (very preliminary) thoughts are at the end.


There are no new Restoration abilities.

  • Feral: Thrash (Level 81): Thrash deals damage and causes all targets within 10 yards to bleed every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. The intent here is to give bears another button to hit while tanking. Talents will affect the bleed, such as causing Swipe to deal more damage to bleeding targets. 5-second cooldown. 25 Rage.

  • Feral: Stampeding Roar (Level 83): The druid roars, increasing the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. Stampeding Roar can be used in cat or bear form, but bears might have a talent to drop the cooldown. The goal of this ability is to give both bears and cats a little more situational group utility. 3-minute cooldown. No cost.
  • Balance: Wild Mushroom (Level 85): Grows a magical mushroom at the target location. After 4 seconds the mushroom becomes invisible. Enemies who cross the mushroom detonate it, causing it to deal area-of-effect damage, though its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. The druid can also choose to detonate the mushroom ahead of time. This is primarily a tool for the Balance druid, and there will be talents that play off of it. No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast.




  • Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

  • Restoration druids will have a new talent called Efflorescence, which causes a bed of healing flora to sprout beneath targets that are critically healed by Regrowth.
  • We want to make the Feral cat damage rotation slightly more forgiving. We do not want to remove what druids like about their gameplay, but we do want to make it less punishing to miss, say, a Savage Roar or Rake. The changes here will be on par with increasing the duration of Mangle like we did for patch 3.3.3.
  • Balance druids will have a new talent ability called Nature’s Torrent, which strikes for either Nature or Arcane damage depending on which will do the most damage (or possibly both), and moves the Eclipse meter more (details below). The improved version of Nature’s Torrent also reduces the target’s movement speed. 10-second cooldown.
  • We plan on giving Feral cats and bears a Kick/Pummel equivalent — an interrupt that is off the global cooldown and does no damage. We feel like they need this utility to be able to fill the melee role in a dungeon or raid group, and to give them more PvP utility.
  • We want to make sure Feral and Balance druids feel like good options for an Arena team. They need the tools to where you might consider a Feral druid over an Arms warrior, or a Balance druid over a mage or warlock. Remember that the PvP landscape will probably look pretty different for Cataclysm with a focus on rated, competitive Battlegrounds.


  • All heal-over-time spells (HoTs) will benefit from crit and haste innately in Cataclysm. Hasted HoTs do not reduce their duration, but instead add additional HoT ticks. Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

  • Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.
  • Druids will lose Abolish Poison with the dispel mechanics change, but Restoration druids will gain Dispel Magic (on friendly targets) as a talent. All druids can still remove poisons with Cure Poison and remove curses with Remove Curse.
  • We want to add tools to cat form and depth to bear form. If a Feral cat is going to fill a very similar niche to that of a rogue, warrior or Enhancement shaman, it needs a few more tools — primarily a reliable interrupt. Bears need to be pushing a few more buttons just so the contrast between tanking and damage-dealing is not so steep.
  • Barkskin will be innately undispellable.
  • We will be buffing the damage of Mangle (cat) significantly so that when cat druids cannot Shred, they are not at such a damage-dealing loss.




  • Restoration – Healing
    Meditation
    HoT Scale Healing
  • Balance – Spell Damage
    Spell Haste
    Eclipse

  • Feral (cat) – Melee Damage
    Melee Critical Damage
    Bleed Damage

  • Feral (bear) – Damage Reduction
    Vengeance
    Savage Defense


HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.


My preliminary thoughts

My first thoughts: Extremely underwhelming. No new ability? That’s pretty unfair. We should get a new toy, too. A whole new expansion and no new ability? Yeah, we get a new talent – which is nice – but where’s our cooldown mitigation type ability? Where’s my cast-on-others Barkskin, or some other “save the day” ability?

I agree that we don’t need another healing spell, but you guys could have given us something else for our toolbox. Giving other classes something new to play with and not us is kinda crappy.

HoT scaling is nice – like a built-in glyph of Rejuv kinda deal. A little extra free healing on Regrowth crits is nice too, but without seeing the numbers it’s hard to say whether it will sway people towards using Regrowth more in raid healing (I always did, though) or whether it will just be a small freebie. Innate haste and crit benefits to HoTs – well, we saw that one coming. It’s tasty, definitely.

As for ToL going to a cooldown – well, at the moment I’m pretty upset. Things may change, maybe I’ll enjoy healing as a cow, seeing my gear more. But I like ToL, it’s hard to have something core to your class made into a cooldown. Imagine if bears were only bears every few minutes? Call me sentimental, but I want the choice to look like a tree or not – if I want to look like a tree all the time, I should be able to do that. No other forms are forced to be on a cooldown. But, unfortunately, there are many people who disagree, and want to heal in “caster form”. The masses have spoken. I just wish we had the choice – let us look like trees if we want to, but only use the cooldown “buff” every few minutes. PLEASE! Let us choose!

Update from Blizzard:

We knew changing Tree of Life to a cooldown was going to be controversial. There was just no way a change this big would be unanimously accepted. My apologies if being a tree was what really drew you to the class.

We didn’t add new rotational spells to Restoration or Feral cat because, good lord, you have enough buttons already. We tried hard with Cataclysm to not add new spells just because. The specs that got new spells were ones we think had big holes in their rotation. You’ll still get new talents and mechanics so I expect there will be a lot to learn when the big game-changing patch rolls around.


Overall, the small changes are nice, but the lack of a new resto ability and making our ToL a cooldown is extremely disappointing.

My vote: nice minor tweaks, but ruined by the disappointing lack of new abilities; very, very sad about ToL being the only iconic druid form that will be on a cooldown.



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