Like many resto druids I almost never leave tree form in pve.  Pretty much the only time this might happen is in 10man when I’m the only druid so I’ll put faerie fire on the boss, putting me outside treeform for all of 1 gcd.  Every now and then on Icehowl I’ll use my cat+dash macro to give myself piece of mind although it’s not really needed.  I might use cat+dash on Anub’arak if I’m focused in a burrow but I don’t even really count this because it hasn’t even happened once in the last 3 weeks.  So I sit in treeform doing my thing, if I get to 1/2 mana I innervate and if I still need mana I used a potion, all the time sitting in treeform.

This is what resto druids, and druids in general (not feral…) have become.  We are no longer the shape shifters we once were in classic, or even TBC (hey at least resto pvp would use bearform back then), balance and resto druids alike just sit in boomkin or tree for entire fights.  It makes you wonder what the point of having these forms is if you are just supposed to stay in them.  I mean as far as tree is concerned, you could easily just replace the 4 talent points with a passive bonus that gave 15% spirit as spellpower, gave a 6% healing aura to the raid, increased your item-armour to 200% and gave you 4% more healing – then at least we’d get to see our armour graphics.

Ghostcrawler did touch on this, the fact that only feral druids switch forms, which is mainly because they have 2 forms and they’ll want to go to caster form to combat rez, innervate someone or may be heal themselves.  While resto and balance stay in their forms other than the odd cat+dash or travelform scenario, and I don’t really count travelform.  Feral is pretty much balanced in this way, they are rewarded for shifting, while balance and resto are only ever penalized for it.  But so far nothing has been done to address this, and even when Ghostcrawler brought it up he kind of said it in a whiny “waahh why dont they shift, they should shift more” kind of way.  Which I for one object to, the reason we don’t shift Mr. Ghostcrawler is simply because you have not given us anything to shift for.

In my mind there are some easy things that could be done to make shifting attractive to resto druids in pve.  And so in no particular order:

1. Bring back fights with mana leech mechanics.  In BC we had a few of these, someone would get a debuff in the raid which drained their mana or there was a pulsing mana leech going on which could be predicted (or had a cast bar).  This would see all the resto/balance druids instantly shifting into bear to avoid the leech.  Simple and affective.
2. Look at why Feral works so well with shifting, other than having 2 primary forms, and emulate this with all specs.  Put simply, ferals can still heal reasonably well and have 2 major abilities for helping others (combat rez and innervate) which they have to shift in order to use.  We could easily copy this idea across to resto by having, say, a resto specced cat actually do something useful for either the druid or the raid.  A simple idea which is by no means finalized could be something along the lines of a talent in deep resto that causes the rake debuff given by a resto specced cat to regen mana/hp/energy/rage to anyone who hits the boss.  Then simply design some of the upcoming encounters to benefit from this mechanic in certain phases/situations and hey presto u got resto druids shifting into cat to apply rake once in a while.
3. Give us specific reasons to move out of tree form.  Give resto some reason to want to put some kind of debuff on the boss, which is only good if you are deep resto  but you have to be in caster form to cast it.  An example of this I liked, while not a debuff of sorts, was to rework the useless tranquillity to be a much shorter cooldown and do something different such as increase the damage of the targeted party within your raid by 10% for 10 seconds while channelled.  And of course make it so you can’t cast it while in tree.

You get the idea, I’m not suggesting any of the above proposals should be implemented I’m just trying to get the ball rolling on fixes to an issue which quite frankly has only got worse as the game as gone on.

Of course I’ve mentioned mainly buffs as a way to persuade people to shift, but the same could easily be done with nerfs.  You could make innervate a balance only talent (and buff it) thus promoting boomkins in raids while also slightly nerfing resto.  But then to counteract not having innervate as resto, make resto have an ability they can use in a feral form to regen mana (similar to enhancement shaman’s mana regen cooldown mechanic) but it requires them to melee the boss in cat/bear.  Hell a simple one would be to create a resto talent which causes frenzied regen to regenerate mana, which would force a resto to go into bear, do some melee damage to get 100 rage and then pop frenzied regen to act like an innervate.

Either by carrot or stick, something needs to be done to get druids shifting again – and I doubt that I’m the only resto druid who thinks so.