There is an old Navy Seal adage known as the 6P’s: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Like many things in life, the winner is often decided by the one who does the most research and preparation ahead of time. So instead of throwing the mouse across the room when you get owned, let’s try a new approach. Learn the enemy.

Top arena players will tell you, in order to beat any class you must first understand them. So let’s take a deep look at the Resto-spec Druid. More specifically, let's look at the arsenal of abilities they can throw at you. The spec that we're going to look at here usually sees some variation in the Restoration Tree, but the Feral and Balance points are fairly fixed.

Anyone who has played an arena game in two versus two or three versus three has run across this monster. The sight of those Mark of the Wild buffs or the glimmer of a bear streaking across the screen can cause thrown keyboards and crushed mice by many of the strongest Warriors.




The Druid’s most annoying and perhaps best talents are its multitude of crowd control abilities:

• Roots
  
• Cyclone
  
• Hibernate
  
• Feral Charge/Bash
  
• Pounce and Maim

While each of these abilities can cause problems for you, they aren’t nearly as daunting once you understand the limitations of each one. Their power comes from a good player’s ability to chain them. If you can stop this chain it obviously gives you the freedom to carry out your game plan.



Entangling Roots – This 1.5 second cast is extremely annoying for melee damage classes, as it fixes you in places and prevents you from keeping within melee range of your target. The functionality of roots is based around a 12 second duration which is naturally broken by any damage taken by the target.

Almost all druids you face will have specialized talent of “Control of Nature”. This ability gives the druid a 100% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting roots and cyclone. Classes with interrupt ability should take note that says “damage” not interrupts. Barkskin, a later ability we’ll talk about, is the way they cast roots and cyclone without being interrupted by abilities.


Cyclone – Probably the most well known of druid Crowd Controls, this 1.5 second cast (1.4 second with PVP gloves) is a 6 second neutralization where you can not perform any actions nor be affected by any during that time. Besides a pvp trinket, there’s really no way out of this crowd control for any class.

The only bright side as the target of a Cyclone is that it suffers from the same diminishing returns (more often you are the subject of this ability, the less time it lasts) as all CC abilities in WoW do. A recent change in 2.4 also reduced the casting range on Cyclone to 20 yards from 30 yards. While this may not seem like much, in arena this translates into potential problems for Druids looking to lock up charging Warriors.


Hibernate – This Crowd Control is effective on Hunter Pets, Shaman’s in ghost wolf and other Druids in beast form. Hibernate can sleep any beast targets, has a 1.5 second cast, and a baseline duration of 40 seconds in PVE which any damage to the target breaks.

This spell is often broken so it’s more commonly used as an effective counter for Druid’s to use against another Druid who is avoiding mana drain by being in non-caster form.


Feral Charge/Bash – Both of these abilities must be performed in the Druid Bear form. “Feral Charge” is an 11 point talent in Feral Combat tree. While most druids will take this talent, they will have to sacrifice other abilities to get this ability.

The most important use of these ability is to interrupt casters. Bash does so with a 4 second stun, while Feral Charge interrupts, and if successful locks out the interrupted ability for 4 seconds. . Feral Charge also immobilizes an enemy for 4 seconds.

Also in the Feral Combat tree is “Brutal Impact” which increases stun duration of both Bash and Pounce by 1 second. With this talent, Bash will stun an enemy for 5 seconds. Typically, Druids will chain a “Feral Charge” followed by a Bash.


Pounce/Maim – Both Pounce/Maim are abilities done in cat form. Pounce, like Bash, also benefits from “Brutal Impact” and is used to open fights. The 4 second stun can only be done while a Druid is stealthed and since they lack vanish ability like rogues, once a Druid is in combat Pounce is no longer an option.

This leaves Maim, the ability with a stun duration of 2-6 seconds. This is a tricky stun because it has a lot of negatives. First, the stun is based on the combo points, with more combo points resulting in a longer duration. A second negative is that if any damage is done to the target after stunned it will break the Maim.