Interviews with Top Arena Druids

After yesterdays articles I interviewed a few of these top Druids to see what they think of their class and many other aspects of the Arena! Unfortunately none of the Feral druids were available for comments, so here are the voices of your top druids:

Pronne (Dark Iron) – Restoration – (US #66) Dont hurt me no more
Lethi (Darkspear) – Moonkin – (US #69) Keepin it Real

Introduce yourself to the readers, describe your team and how a typical arena match goes for you.

PRONNE(Resto): Hey guys my name is Pronne, I play a tauren druid on the server Dark Iron in BG 8 or Shadowburn battle group. My 5v5 team called "Baby Dont Hurt Me" plays a three caster dps and two healer 5v5 team consisting of myself as the restoration druid, Xantus as a shadow priest, Mikeyo as a mage, Superpaul as an affliction warlock, Tinkerbellia and Nausikaa filling the roles of our paladin. My role in my team is to protect my casters from damage, interrupts and being crowd controlled for the most part with coordinating my cyclone and feral charge on a healer with my teams burst. It seems to work out extremely well.

LETHI(Moonkin): Lethi here. We roll a 3 dps setup that differs from the usual cookie cutter. MS/Fury Warrior, Holy Pallydan, Holy Priest, SL Warlock, Balance Druid. Best thing about our team is we aren't completely reliant on the warrior like all of the bloodlust/windfury warrior teams that make up the top 20 - every one of us can hold our own and get the damage done. I get focus fired a lot of games and it's fairly easy to lock a balance druid down but with 14k armor, 350 resilience and 12k health unbuffed I'm pretty tank. Depending on the team we're facing I sometimes even run out there first acting as a massive feathery bull’s-eye to get them onto me. The only teams that really give us trouble are mana burn/outlasting teams, still working on a strat for those teams.


Racials have always been a heated debate since the early days of organized Warsongulch, but now with Arena and more riding on the line especially people getting new gear and possibly money through tournaments the debate has gotten even hotter. To my findings a large majority of top Druids in Arena are Tauren, it has long been said that Horde’s racials are more PvP oriented (WoTF, Warstomp, etc) while Alliance racial’s are more PvE oriented (Diplomacy, Wisp Spirit, etc). What are your thoughts on Racials?

LETHI(Moonkin): Warstomp's gold for a spec with no interrupts but there's still a few situations where I wish I had shadowmeld. 5% health seals the deal though; glad I'm a cow! I've always thought all racials should be banned in arenas, it just adds to the whole scissor paper rock "team a > team b and there's nothing team b can do about it" thing.

PRONNE(Resto): Racials are huge when it comes down to a big tournament or even the everyday ladder. Horde does have an advantage in racials for pvp but the priest racials of alliance are far superior. Will of the forsaken is on par with escape artist in my opinion but when you compare other horde racials to alliance, horde is favored without a contest. As a tauren druid, racials give me the option to get better healing stats with the extra 500-600 health from endurance along with warstomp. Where as night elves get a mediocre talent, shadow meld, which can get you a few extra ticks of drinking but that’s about it. For my own benefit racials would be nice to keep on but in all fairness there can’t be any racials when it comes to arenas.


Since the launch of TBC Blizzard has been fixated on nerfing the Paladin class so it is not relied on 100% in both PvE and PvP. In the most recent published plans for the class they are adding a cool down of 1 minute to Blessing of Sacrifice, while it looks solid on paper this is extremely detrimental to non-dispelling healing classes in Arena such as: Resto Druids/Resto Shamans. With the dependency of two dispellers in 5v5 Arena this new Paladin change will render every class except Priests useless as a secondary healer. What are your thoughts on this up coming change?

PRONNE(Resto): I think nerfing their Blessing of Sacrifice is a bad idea. For a lot of paladins its a huge crutch, not only to break crowd control abilities, but it's also used as a way to reduce damage taken on one target. In lower tiers of arena play I think we will see fewer paladins on the top but I don’t think they will be hurting too badly in large-scale arenas. This nerf will most likely relinquish the crown of 3v3 healers to druids and priests.

LETHI(Moonkin): Maybe it's because all my teams are full offensive caster dps teams but paladin utility doesn't seem like much of a threat. Since we're unaffected by BoP and BoF and paladins are so easy to CC and their heals are slow they're pretty much a joke to us. I've always seen priests and resto druids as better pvp healers and imo shaman utility blows paladins away. I really can't see the problem with paladins but I'm probably not in the best position to.


There was a time when Moonkin Druids were the laughing stock of most guilds. With TBC and the ability for people to get exceptional gear from all over not just PvE you are seeing more of them come out of the wood works and are actually fairing quite well in the Arena. What are your thoughts of Moonkin’s in the arena, and can we see more of them in the future?

LETHI(Moonkin): I honestly think Balance Druids are one of the most overpowered class/specs in the game. Yeah, we were a little lacking pre-BC and I even PvPed as spell damage resto for the longest time but they went too far with the buffs. I just can't work out why there aren't more high rated moonkins out there.

PRONNE(Resto): I was actually considering going a balance spec for my 5v5's for a while but decided not to because I would have to invest a lot of arena points into a restoration and balance set of gear. But personally I think this spec is on par with resto. The abilities that moonkins have to disrupt almost everything going on by placing treants on a caster dps to give them spell pushback to reduce damage taken, along with cyclone/roots, amazing burst damage, and an option of popping out of form to toss a few heals around. I'm sure we'll see more rise up in the rankings. I also plan on giving this spec a try in the near future.


As an attempt to make Druids more viable in a PvP aspect blizzard gave them one of the now most infamous abilities in the game: Cyclone. Many players have voiced extreme disgust over this talent seeing as it is non-dispelable (and even removes Aura’s/Stance’s). As a Druid what are your thoughts on Cyclone, was it much needed for the Druid class or something that didn’t help the problem or even made it worse?

PRONNE(Resto): Cyclone was an absolute must for the druid class in my opinion. We, as a class, did not have the benefits of the other healing classes that give them more versatility. Abilities such as blessing of freedom/sacrifice, mana burn, and an overall dps increase with bloodlust and totems from the three other healing classes gave them the synergy with other classes. Without cyclone we would only have roots to which is mediocre at best being dispellable and considering the fact that most melees run with a paladin giving them blessing of freedom. We would just be a pure heal-bot that goes oom faster than any other class.

LETHI(Moonkin): I admit cyclone's overpowered. I can see it getting nerfed in the near future when the new flavor of the month resto druid/SL drain lock 2v2 combo really takes off and dominates the bracket. Although it'd hurt my teams I kind of hope it does get nerfed, its way over the top.


If there was one thing you could change about the Druid class to make your time playing World of Warcraft more enjoyable whether it be in PvE or PvP, what would it be?

LETHI(Moonkin): We need a spell interrupt. Badly. It's the one thing holding balance druids back from being a huge force in top ranked arenas. Maybe a talent somewhere high up in the balance tree since it might be a bit overpowered in the hands of a resto druid supports healing. Furor and feral stuns are great but they're not enough and cost way too much mana. My armory usually doesn't show it but I'm 45/11/5 when we arena.

PRONNE(Resto): I personally think its fine the way it is. Although itemization is kind of off with the balance set, which I will begin to pick up after this week.


Thanks for your time, are there any shout outs you would like to make?
LETHI(Moonkin): Many waffles to all my teammates - Lethul, Rockwell, Toez, Kokokang, Schweex, Heinous and that warlock scrub whose name eludes me. Also I'd like to give a shout out to my boys Aarc and Connect. Props to all the balance druids out there who put the effort in instead of qq’ing about the class, keep it up lads!


Thank you to Pronne and Lethi for going out of their ways to do these interviews.Be sure you to come back tomorrow for the new 900 Club rankings as well as a new update on the Battle Ground Competitiveness Ranks this weekend! Also on a side note, after only 1 week we’ve amazingly already had 5000+ hits, so keep spreading the word!