Naughty BoomBashers Naughty Boomkins

As always this morning, I had a quick troll through the various sites I have linked to this blog. I was somewhat astounded by what I found as it shook my dangly,feathery bits for a moment. I had an initial pappa Boomdaddy feeling, then some anger and then some sadness. The offending article was posted on the blog of the ever lovely Egotistical Priest by one of her minions about Boomkins of all things. Now if it had been a rant about Magetards, that would be both acceptable and understandable, but to stab at the heart of the Boomkin establishment simply isn't cricket, old chap. The Boomdaddy played nice and kept his toys in his pram but it has spurred me to think about what the original poster said and why we need to listen and pay credence.

The basic gist if you haven't clicked on the link and read it, is a scenario where the balance specced druid (careful use or wording there, did ya notice?) has pulled almighty agro with starfall and presumably hurricane. The poster priest has to shield him/her in order to stop them becoming road kill, the tank struggles to regain aggro and the artist formerly known as a Boomkin, typhoons the mobs away, leaving the poor tank to scuttle after them and try somehow to regain aggro.

Ok wings up, all Boomkins have done this at least once in their careers. You know what though?, we did it as a laugh on the friday- night- bit pissed on cheap wine- instance runs with guildies. We have done it for comic effect to annoy our lovely feral tank and grumpy shaman guild leader. We have done it in runs through ZG, nuking the bejesus out of low level mobs in a retarded AoE contest with locks and Magetards. Ok, so read all the above, it was done a handful of times for shit and giggles.

If you are a Boomkin that does this kind of thing in PuG's, instances and raids, then the Boomdaddy's Eye of Mordor is on you. You are an embarrassment and a disgrace. Stripped of the Boomkin title, you will walk the street of shame being known as "just a balance spec druid". Mages and Locks pull this kind of shit trying to be top of the pops, we do not.

We remember what it was like in TBC when we were aggro magnets and how we couldn't put out the damage of dps clasess. We remember being told by a raiding guild that the only use for a Boomkin was on a BBQ and was told to respec.../gquit.We learnt the rules of aggro, we learned spell rotation, we tried to assemble workable kit (despite of Blizzard). Of course we want to do as high a damage level of possible, thats part of our job in a raid...part of, remember that. We rez, we cross heal and sometimes if you are really cute or have a sexy teamspeak voice we may even give you our innervate juice. Dps is the thing we do when not holding the raid together.

Do not act the bollocks and get us bad raid rep, do not undo a lot of hard work by a lot of decent Boomkin players. Get your Omen threat meter. Analyze your spec and rotations, learn the consequences of your actions. Typhoon should not be taken out of your bag of tricks in a raid unless it is to get mobs of the healer in an emergency, The list of times when Starfall should realistically be used in end game WoTLK raiding is thinner than a hungry stick insect. That's why I call it an AK47 in the hands of a toddler, bad things tend to happen if you are not smart.

So what has gone wrong? Why are there some "balance specced druids" out there causing a kerfuffle. Lets look at the Boomkin timeline.

Early TBC

Lets face it we were pretty crap. Gear was mostly pvp or paint explosion mismatch of cloth and leather. Even specced for threat reduction we pulled more than Brad Pitt in a singles and divorced club. We were the poster child for Lynx deodorant. Half the time we were waiting for the Omen bong bong bong noise to go away. Raid guilds used us as target dummies for melon throwing practice.

Middle TBC

Things seemed to get better. Broader minded raid guilds started to pick up a few Boomkins and we became a steady raid members. Our reasonable dps, raid utility and buffs were finally considered raid worthy. Top 5 dps places were pretty standard.

Late TBC

As with other classes, things got silly. God gave us a viable AoE and crowd control. We nuked the Locks into second place. We were the daddy and the mummy rolled into one. Some people got lazy....that's problem 1.

Early Wrath

Problem 2 emerges with the rise of Wrath. Now that Boomkins were really BOOOOOOMKINS they started appearing everywhere. Every druid I saw seemed to have turned balance to get to 80. Good luck to them and I hope they enjoyed the experience. Some have not gone back to what they were good at though and we appear to have inherited a new tier of Moonkins. Lacking in experience, skill and code. Don't shout... my point is a player could have easily leveled from 70-80 in 3-4 weeks and that is not what I call experienced. Some are great though, of course!

Blizzard is partly to blame for the laziness in all the dps classes. When you can AoE bulldoze your way through NAXX with no real need for crowd control, people will take the easy option. This was one reason why our GM banned us all from AoE'ing mobs in naxx (apart from the obvious AoE groups), people were forgetting how to single target mobs and pulling AoE bullshit all the time.

Conclusion. The lazy nuking druids need to remember the basics and work hard again, the fresh faces need to do their research. In that way the Boomdaddy will not get indigestion from reading BoomBashing on very eminent and well respected blogs, and would get some work done. Where I would never like to read our spec being derided, it is good to hear others views on our class, so we can continue to improve as the highest evolution of druid.