The problem with SoD seems to be that the team had great ideas for some classes/specs that they know how to play and know how they function but then struggle with figuring out how other things even work or plays like and how the new abilities will end up synergizing with classic gameplay.
I’ve been complaining about Hunters since Phase 1 and it took them 3 phases to do the most sensible obvious “u-duh!” tuning to Sniper Training. So the problem isn’t that they can’t tune these specs/classes rune/abilities/gear to be more useful, it’s that they take too long to do it and in the meantime us who main those specs/classes just get to suffer bad design.
All they got to do is to keep a finger on the pulse to see what players who play the specs (that the dev team doesn’t) have to say about those specs and adjust things accordingly.
They just don’t seem to know what they are doing with a lot of them which makes everyone who plays a class/spec that feels underdeveloped feel frustrated.
My frustration comes since week 2 or 3 of SoD and have been building up over time. Reason I’m being so vitriolic towards this team is due to their lack of response or appropriate tuning (or flat out overhaul).
When it comes to druid it has 4 specs (or 3, or 5, it depends on how you look at it) which means that with 3 runes per slot it is going to be extremely railroaded down a particular design with no real choice in the matter. The devs have decided that X will play like Y and that’s that. Which I think is unfair to the class as other classes get more flexibility in rune building but ok fine that’s what SoD team wanna do then do it. But like you said, they don’t seem to know what it is that they want to do.
Savage Roar, here’s some damage.
Wild Strikes, here’s some damage. Oh and for others too I guess.
Mangle, here’s some damage, and I guess some extra bleed damage for bosses.
Berserk, here’s a CD buff for energy cost reduction, meaning more damage.
KOTJ, Here’s more damage + energy for more damage.
Basically just burst dps.
There’s no new effects or utility or cc kind of abilities. Nothing for stealth. The most we got was Skull Bash but if you’re in a group then it’s better to just go with Savage Roar over it but it has its solo uses at least for interrupting spell casting mobs. And then we got a survivability rune that was quickly replaced by KOTJ as it is better.
To me, what kitty kat seems to be is just pure dump DPS. We’re not CC. We’re not utility. We’re not buffers. We’re not augmenters. We’re not tanks unless we go bear which is a whole different set of runes. We’re not healers. We can… I dunno, capture the flag more easily in WSG maybe?
We’re basically a simplified rogue but without all of the extra utility that comes with it except 30% faster movement speed. So if all the runes reflect a burst dump DPS playstyle then powershifting doesn’t seem to be part of that design to begin with. And in this kind of playstyle the shred rune doesn’t flow with it and the Gore rune does help whenever the coin flip decides to work in your favor, any other time and you get nothing from it.
It’s a bit late for them to decide to lean into powershifting.
Lets not forget you got windfury on A Rune aswell. You wont Get wotlk gamebreaker here