WotLK Beta News - Rise of the Rogues and Druids

It never fails. Rogues and Druids have a very love hate relationship. Druids hate that they are toned down rogues. Rogues hate that druids might take their gear. We have a ton of fun being druids, but the reality is that in Burning crusade, feral druids only advantage is that they can tank AND melee DPS. So you can keep a pocket tank that isn't completely useless as DPS, but not as good as a primary DPS.

Our buffs to the raid are valuable, but odds are high that you've got a resto druid to manage that. Leader of the Pack is a nice buff, but one of the major down falls Druids suffer is that in the later 25 man content there is no compelling reason why you NEED a lot of tanks. Very few fights need more than 1-2 tanks. You'll need to bring a pally and a warrior probably so Druids can easily be shelved in many cases. Our DPS Does not scale well in T6. We can keep pace in T5, but we really drop off in T6 and Sunwell.

Pure Energy
WARNING**** WARNING**** BETA NEWS*** READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL**** GUARANTEED TO BE DIFFERENT BY GA*****
OK I'm very impressed by a neat little change that occurred. Energy as we know it today has a Tick. Basically you will regenerate energy every time a Tick occurs. Under the current method you regain 20 energy every 2 seconds. Under the new system which became active in the last beta release, you get 1 energy every 0.1 seconds. What this translates to is a constant energy regen. How many times have rogues and druids been stuck staring at the bar screaming, "COME ON!!! ONE MORE TICK!!!!" as they maddly mash the button needed. Now you should be able to use your energy sooner and more efficiently.

It looks pretty neat to stare up at your energy bar and watching it constantly gaining in energy. For druids this is an amazing change. I'll do a write up in more detail later, but some of the current beta talents make energy usage much more efficient. I'll put up a post later to outline what the new talents could mean to solo, PVP and Raiding play.

Mana Regen
It sounds like to me based on the discussions in General chat that Mana regen may be going to a similar system as energy for regeneration. I haven't been able to verify this yet. My hunter is dutifully waiting for me to start on Howling Fjord. I want to finish up the Borean Tundra first with my druid before I swap back and forth too much, but keep an eye out for it. I know some of our blogging hunters out there want to know.... Yes EVERYONE has a devilsaur and its kind of obnoxious... personally I'm aiming to tame a Mammoth if I can.

More to Come
I found a lot of neat stuff last night in the beta. I don't want to ruin the story for a bunch of people, but I've been capturing a bunch of screenshots for use. Once I can figure out how to use GIMP to trim them and resize them I'll put up some of the neat what I would deem "easter eggs" that blizzard has scattered around and just some nice pictures I enjoyed. Either way, the stability of the servers after the last beta patch is encouraging. There are still issues (last night I had connection issues, but the world server wasn't crashing), but it seems a lot more stable than the initial release.