61 Druid Guide – Melee DPS with Strong Solo Gameplay Potential

Hello and welcome. This guide will quickly guide you through the 61 Druid spec, outlining strengths and weaknesses, talking you through the rotation, and also providing you with some protips to maximize your damage output with this spec.

Strengths:

• Competitive with Inquisitor in terms of DPS
• Strong single target burst
• Very easy rotation
• Strength of the Fae provides a strong survive-ability cooldown for large burst AOE damage
• Can also be used to solo content effectively

Weaknesses:

• Suffers a considerable DPS loss if you cannot be in melee range of your target the majority of the time
• Relies on using a pet
• Behind Shaman by roughly 10-15% damage
• Doesn’t scale well in a raid environment

The Spec

61 Druid/10 Shaman/5 Inquisitor

There is also a Justicar variant for Salvation which provides increased self-healing. The points in Justicar also provide a small increase in survivability (only use for solo gameplay): http://rift.magelo.com/en/soultree#l8g/DkGBiBhlkl8/r8

Buffs:

• Armor of Devotion
• Fury of the Fae
• Vengeance of the Winter Storm
• Subtlety
• Aid of the Forest
• Through Step (Optional– causes your Fae Step to teleport you behind the enemy)

Pets:

• Single target DPS: Satyr Destroyer
• AOE: Greater Faerie Seer WITH toggled ability Fae Dispersion on
• Soloing: Greater Satyr Protector

Macro’s:

Single Target:
show Fervent Strike
suppressmacrofailures
cast [notactive] Spirit of Asphodel
cast Fae Mimicry
cast Essence Strike
cast Combined Effort
cast Resounding Blow
cast Massive Blow
cast Fervent Strike
cast Trickster’s Bolt

AOE:
show Wild Strike
suppressmacrofailures
cast [notactive] Spirit of Upheaval
cast Wild Strike

Single target rotation:
Eruption of Life -> Crushing Force -> Spam Macro x4 -> Vex -> Then continue to spam your macro while reapplying both Crushing Force and Vex whenever they fall off.

Your Eruption of Life will be continually refreshed by Essence Strike provided you stick to the same target. If for whatever reason it falls off, be sure to reapply it as soon as possible.

If you are using the Justicar variant for solo gameplay, follow the same rotation, just take out Vex.

AOE Rotation:
Spam Wild Strike, literally it is that simple! If you’re if a dungeon or raid scenario using the Satyr Destroyer pet and think you’re going to be AOEing for longer than 10-15 seconds it will be a DPS gain to quickly summon your Greater Faerie Seer Pet and quickly tog on Fae Dispersion .

It can be an all-around DPS increase to use the ST macro 4 times when you have Fae Mimicry off cooldown and this is even more useful when one target in particular needs a bit more damage than others. Be sure to put this ability on a separate bar so that you watch this cooldown carefully.

It is as easy as that!

Utility:

Interrupts/Silences:

• Notion Theft: Interrupt, 10 second CD, not on the GCD
• Grim Silence: Interrupts the target and silences it for 5 seconds, 30 second CD, on the GCD

Movement:

• Fae Step: Teleports to the Enemy and gives you a 50% speed increase for 5 seconds, 15 second CD, not on the GCD
• Ride the Lightning: Charges toward the Enemy, 15 second CD, on the GCD

Other

• Slumber: Puts the target to sleep for 10 seconds, damage done will break this, 30 second CD, on the GCD

Protips:

• Druid is going to burn your mana like crazy. Be sure to stock up and always carry lots of mana pots to avoid having to constantly waste GCDs to sacrifice health for mana.
• You can take Spirit of Unheavel and Spirit of Asphodel out of your macros and manually toggle them which in certain scenarios can lead to a possible DPS increase.

If you want to see this spec in action and see how goddamn overpowered it actually is, check out the following video of me soloing Lord Greenscale (20 Man): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsmRItS-PhI

Thanks once again guys, any feedback, questions or corrections feel free to leave them in the comments below, cheers!

~Seatin