Originally Posted by Bloody_sorcerer
You're too OOM to cast a normal healing spell but you've got the mana to drop into bear form and hit frenzied regen and convert your maybe ten rage into HP?
The same issue applies to dropping into kitty form and meleeing for mana; you're too OOM to keep nuking, but you can spare the ~1k mana to drop into cat form, melee for a while (doing sub-par DPS, mind you), and then hop back to moonkin form to resume real DPS? I don't see how this would be preferable at all to throwing on a feral weapon and whacking a mob around a bit.
In any case, whenever I'm non-feral, the most useful feral ability has been AOE taunt as a backup taunter on Solarian.
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Well off course you're not just going to lump a feature like that in there for that purpose without doing some work to make it compatible now are you? That is a designer challenge, off course you'd have to address how much mana you're going to get back, how long is it reasonable to stay in a feral form to do this, how much dps would you lose by doing it and consequently where will you refund it? That is how you make mana on melee using a feral form raid viable, otherwise it would be a feature that is beneficial only in PvE solo and some portions of Pvp world or BGs.
What you could do, is tune the feral tree to make this a raid useable tool for balance druids, and an alternative to going balance/restoration up to intensity, for intensity will give you passive mana regen, but the alternative would be off spec into the feral tree where your burst mana regen would be made viable. Giving balance druids a choice again, those who want a little bit more involvement of their whole class in their spec, will go balance/feral, those who want pure casting no forms will go balance/resto.
Here is the link I promised, it's a talent tree I did a while ago on war-tools, showing a way Balance and Feral could have synergy with themselves, and resto with Feral as well. Do not in this tree I was also of the philosophy that you shouldn't need to spend more than 41-45 points in one tree max at level 70, and availble to plow the other points in your other trees which although they help your other spell schools, those talent trees should also help your role in some way, so you're bringing out more of your class abilities. At max level you are a master.
here is the link:
War Tools :: Talent tree Druid trees with full synergy between each tree
I am not a dev, so the figures used there are very rough, I'm sure if anything like it was implemented they'd be fine tuned immensely, it just gives a rough idea, shows you away for coping with damage loss by boosting your melee damage and giving you a spell damage buff on shifting out. The idea is that you are only spending 10-15secs every 3-4 mins on a boss fight to get melee back, this off course could be tweaked to 10-15secs every 10 mins instead, lots of fiddling but it could work. It's a way.
Originally Posted by gnoop
You must realize that Druids are very multi-purpose. We don't have only one or two roles that we fill out of three trees, using one for some minor utility. We can fill four roles and are the only ones to do so (tank, caster dps, melee dps, healer). Given that we have only 3 trees to do this and that the greatest synergies for everything other than healing are to be found in the Restoration tree, I'm really not sure what you're really complaining about?
Resto's aren't making great use of Feral talents? Let's be serious. This is a tree that is already dealing with 2 specs; both tanking and melee dps. It not only has to provide the critical tools for those roles, it has to be pretty well self-sufficient as other areas deal with other specific and very different roles. The only real synergies we see for Balance and Feral are with Resto. For Resto, it's quite common to just put 61 points in Resto and be done. For raiding which allows for grinding, you might go 19/0/42 thanks to healing gear having spell damage on it. What more are you looking for?
As has already been said, the best synergies between the trees are found in pvp. For pve, you're generally very focused on a specific task and spec accordingly.
As for freezing out the Feral tree for Resto's, I'm quite fine with it. Balance synergizes much better with Resto in the first place, making it a welcome addition, in my opinion. Given that, previously, running 0/20/41 or 0/19/42 meant that I was switching into Feral gear to do reasonable damage, it also meant that I wasn't healing myself for that much when in trouble and didn't have all the Feral resources at my fingers. Now that I can either stay in healing gear or switch to dps gear while keeping decent +healing, grinding has become easier to accomplish as Resto.
I'm all for synergies where they make sense, but given that I get enough use out of Feral with cat+dash and the occasional Pounce, I'm quite happy.
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I'm not, I was speaking more about the Feral School than of the Feral tree, I think opting a Resto feral should be an option because it's a different play style outside pvE instances than going Resto/balance, I think it makes the selection quite interesting. And it's a shame that tree wise the only synergy there is balance with resto, resto with balance and feral with resto, when there could be more.
Originally Posted by Miststorm
Beserk will be interesting.
Currently our only buffs that we loose when switching forms are Dash, Enrage and our bear heal, which is annoying enough. If beserk is joined in that, then it wont be that useful in PvP because we cannot shift out of slows without loosing our 2 minute CD. So once people realise that slows do not cause loss of control, and that we loose our buff when we shift out, you will see that slows will become a very strong counter to it.
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That's a very good point. I'm sure rogues will love to cry overpowered when they see their abilities off course but you have a point, I wish when switching out of bear form your rage didn't completely vanish, but contnued to dissipate normally in the background.. I also wish that our energy built up in the background, and blizzard could say shifting to Cat form uses 40 energy, so when you shift you're on 60, Furor makes you shift with 100 energy.
More interesting would be if you generated rage in the background on being hit, or if basically using 1 mana deducted 1/1000 or 1/100 energy from your background pool
Anyway back to the matter at hand, maybe they could make it such that you didn't lose beserk at least when you switched form but it's effect only worked in your desired form.