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End-Game Druids in PvE

Universal Druid Roles – Crowd Control and Status Curing.
No matter what your spec, you will be of great help to any dungeon or raid group by using your crowd control and status curing abilities to their best effect.

A Druid’s primary crowd control ability, hibernate, works on beasts and dragonkin. Druids are the only class that can effectively crowd control dragonkin, and using hibernate on beasts lets mages save their polymorphs for humanoids. It is difficult to think of a contribution to a group that is more valuable than keeping a monster out of combat while your group can work on killing other enemies. In many encounters in WoW, divide and conquer really is the name of the game. Do not forget about entangling roots either as another form of crowd control. While it only works in outdoor dungeons (currently for end game that means Zul’Gurub and the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj), it is a very effective crowd control spell if used correctly. Be sure to target enemies that are going to be rendered harmless by the crowd control (in general, this means enemies that use melee attacks), and be ready to explain to your group to treat a rooted enemy as controlled, as many players won’t expect this form of crowd control. In specific situations within these outdoor dungeons, a druid working with hibernate and entangling roots can crowd control 2 enemies at once….no other class can do this like a druid can.

Your status curing abilities, remove curse and abolish poison, are very useful to groups as well. While restoration druids will naturally be looking for these debilitating effects and curing them, balance and feral druids need to remember they can do this too. If a party member gets a particularly nasty curse on him, jump out of cat form for a moment and get it off. Never count on another class to remove the status effect…remember, you’re a druid, which means you’re playing a much more sophisticated, complex class than the mages and priests out there … it’s up to you, as someone who has leveled a character reacting to a great deal of situations and requiring a tremendous amount of flexibility, to be on the ball and react quickly. You can’t expect the mage who has spent 60 levels pressing one button to cast frostbolt to think as quickly on his feet as you have to.

Balance and Feral Druids
In general, a balance or feral specced druid is going to be fulfilling the role of a Mage or Rogue (or possibly warrior). The general strategies for playing these specs are similar to playing a normal mage or rogue. For a balance druid, do ranged damage with spells and watch your aggro, while a feral druid should do melee damage, and use cower and some restraint to manage aggro.

When playing one of these roles, however, always remember you have other abilities, and use your versatility. If a priest is out of mana, take over healing while he regens. If a monster gets on a caster, shift to bear and pull it off of the cloth wearer until a warrior is able to pick it up. Don’t become so focused on your feral dps or balance abilities that you completely forget the other things you can do, or you really will be no better than a weak rogue or mage. Be sure to gather gear appropriate to all your roles, not just to your chosen spec. For some encounters, a feral druid is simply not as useful as a healing or decursing druid; in these situations, you don’t want to be stuck with trying to heal with the tiny mana pool provided by feral gear.

Restoration Druids
Druids who focus on healing can be very effective additions to end game raids. In general, you will function best in complement to a priest. Your HoTs and his HoT will function well together. Try to coordinate with other druid’s in the raid to figure out who will heal who and who will use what spells, as your HoT effects from regrowth and rejuve will not stack with each other. Experiment with lower ranks of healing touch as well, as it can be very useful to throw around some lower rank heals to save mana when party members are only taking a small amount of damage. If you’ve specced for innervate, use it early and often; many end game fights take much longer than 6 minutes, so you may get to use it 2 or even 3 times if you don’t hoard it. You should generally save innervate for yourself or other druids and priests. The other mana using classes have their own ways to recover mana, and druids and priests, with their high spirit, benefit much more from innervate than most other classes. Overall, focus on learning to coordinate and work well with other healers in the raid. No single healer can do everything in the game’s end dungeons, only a well coordinated healing team has a chance to succeed.