well yeah, sorry for implying the crit. the bottom line is even with 430 defense and 10k life the tank got wtf pwned in like 2 seconds.

Having a feral druid actually saved a wipe on a boss!

=D

You know, I think that's true. I mean, Vek'lor's Shadow Bolt, for example, sure as hell can't crit. Gehennas's can't either. Those would one-shot a lot of people if they could. It makes sense. Blizzard wants to be able to define a damage range for specific mob abilities without spikiness. If they want to make a nasty ability that will badly hurt players with 5k hp, they can make it do 3500 damage. If it can sometimes crit, then it'd sometimes instantly kill them, and they couldn't even have abilities that consistently took a majority, but not all, of your life.

this would add a somewhat compelling argument for druid tanks over warriors on physical damage based special attack mobs. The primary argument I see is that the druid gets crit more. If specials can't crit and even 50% of the mob's damage comes from its specials, then it would seem, at least theory craft wise, that the druid could come out ahead, essentially taking less damage thanks to the Crushing Blow mitigation. ( This is of course, if Shield Block stopping crushing is unintended. Can never seem to get a straight answer on this. If this is intended, then it makes warriors forever superior)

On the topic of shadowflame critting, on Firemaw it non-crit our MT with Onyxia cloak for 18k.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a160/Ryu...06_20332723.jpg

That's the 20k "no Onyxia cloak you lose" event, in Defensive Stance.

I think it would make feral extremely viable if they added something that used to be in beta, make it a 31 point feral talent for balancing reasons:

Play Dead
Requires 30 talents in Feral
2 min Cooldown
Requires Cat Form

The druid plays dead, which may trick enemies into ignoring you. Lasts 15 seconds.

This would give kitties the aggro reduction they need, but more importantly, would allow us to switch gear mid fight, which would greatly increase our effectiveness. Being able to switch between 1800 AP, 500+ Healing and 90m/5 , and 15.5k armor, would push our flexibility to the edge.

I could probably go as far as to put this on a 5 or 10 minute cooldown so the rogues dont bitch too much.

Thing is he actually had his Onyxia cloak on since he had been tanking him the other 90% of the fight.

Lag spike then. During Nef before we moved to new hardware we once had multiple people get Shadow Flame ticks when Nef landed despite having their cloaks on, because the periodic effect that strips the debuff was so lagged.

Haha, right before they moved Mal'Ganis to the glorious nirvana of the new clusters, we had a Nefarion fight where when he landed and did the mini-ShadowFlame everyone got the DoT for a while before the server caught up and went "Oh, hay, you guys do have your cloaks on. My bad."

I would assume that it was lag related.

Edit: Gurg is actually a composite personality of 5 Identical Siamese-Twins, separated weeks after birth. At least three of them are refreshing every thread he posts in at all times.

Yeah thats what we had figured since it was one of our laggy instance nights. But I guess my origional point was someone could interpret that as a critical shadow flame.

Only it never worked in beta.

Oh, it makes perfect sense from a design perpective. I'd just never even considered that they actually did things this way.

People trying to make RPG's seem to run into this all the time. Crits are a baked-in concept when most people think of RPG combat, but excessive spikiness in damage input isn't good, because you can't keep your players alive. Anyone who's ever played D&D has been critted and killed by a monster that they could handle 95% of the time. The DM would just shrug at you as if to say, "that's the way of things."

If Blizz had actually had the foresight to just say, "forget it, NPC spells won't crit, and we really don't care about the complete lack of flavor caused by aysmmetry," I'd be kind of impressed.

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What's the best addon for collecting data in raids?

great thread... allot of the stigma around the feral specs is that its either

1) played by clowns that are too busy trying to prove they do everything aswell or better then warriors and rogues instead of proving they can multi-task very well.
2) the gear wasnt available before to test its full potential.

as for the innervate/hotw situation would it be plausible that they just shuffle the resto tree so that innervate was the 21 point talent instead making 24/0/27? and 0/30/21 even more pve friendly. maybe if that would be too powerfull nerf innervate abit down or just shuffle some of the better resto tallents past 21 so full resto druids dont lose their advantages of going past 21. or maybe just leave it all as is cause bliz will fubar anything they touch

:P

No, Innervate is way too good to be anything but a 30 or 31 point talent. The only viable innervate movement suggestion that I've ever seen was making it the 31-point Balance talent and making the 31-point Restoration talent Moonkin, except with a limitation that only Nature spells may be cast. That made a lot of sense as Innervate is in line with Balance, and Horde don't have a plate-level AC healer class.

Anyway, a couple of months later and with a ton of great feral gear and 3-piece Genesis, I'm running around with 9/11/31 and very happy with it overall from a PvE spec. It's OK from a PvP viewpoint as well, but it doesn't have the burst damage of heavy Feral or heavy Balance to take down equally well-geared Mages or Warlocks. Oh well.

Haha, I get it now. For some reason, the default number of posts per page was increased a while ago. So I'd remembered this as a >10page thread, and was confused when I came back to find it as a 6page thread.

I'd honestly assumed that Gurgthock just deleted the entire second half of the thread in an effort to preserve the good discussion at the beginning.

Having played all three specs heavily I have went through all the different discussions myself. 1st thing is 'What does your raid need?' Another is 'How conventional are they?' Druids can be used in quite a few different ways. But you have to have support from your raid to succeed. I have seen cases where Druids were allowed to try something unconventional (tank, dps)but were setup for failure. Either by their raid or themselves (some Druids who think they are feral really should give it up).
Bear tanks when geared properly with HoTW can get their HP to ridiculous marks. I was at over 8k with no flask , and that was without some of the gear now. And with 14k armor. Different healing style with a Druid tank. And once I get aggro, I am not going to lose it. But as it is right now... it is a novelty. Warriors are still THE tanks in this game and will always be. But for example, for a guild that is low on tanks and they are going in to kill Vael (assuming they have sufficient healing). Let a bear tank start off, get BA first. That's one more Warrior for execute. Maybe not needed for you guys. But you get my point?
Now cats.......we don't have vanish so true. BUT, only a rookie druid is going to pull aggro. Cower. Use it. It's a poor druids vanish. Plus, you hear all these 'feral druids' talking about how high their Crit is. Cmon. We have a 1.0 attack speed for sustained dps. Get more attack power and work on crit. Now for both of these they have LoTP. To me another novelty and I really dont think it is that important....BUT if you are going to test out a feral. Go all out. Make a death squad. With Rogues/Warrior (fury)/Hunter and your druid. And I am talking about your top DPS ones. I bet you would be surprised at how much of a difference that increased and sustained dps would make a difference on a boss. Think about how fast Princess Huhuran would go down with a grp like that.
Now I respecd to Balance for the last 2 months or so. Even I was surprised. I can do some REAL dps as a druid. My guild had more than enough healers and needed extra dps one time for the Razorgore fight. I went moonkin (35/0/16). When they showed the dmg meters they almost shit themselves when I was #1. I think that was an anomaly. But we did an mc run this weekend and I was top 5. And if you look at my gear......I am not even near where a Balance druid could be geared out to(about +225dmg). And I only have one piece of cloth (junk to the rest of the cloth wearers). Throw me in a grp with some bad ass mages/locks you will see a difference in any boss encounter with the added +3% crit.Oh, and the balance tree is broken atm. And you still have an emergency healer as well as the BattleRez and extra decurser/ cleanser.
Now those are all scenarios that are probably not going to happen, don't know why some Guilds don't try things like that out. The ones that the concerns come up with are usually the top notch Guilds who could afford to test this out. You could throw out all the numbers, stats, and blah blah blah. But try it sometime (with a Druid that actually has a clue though lol :P )
Just my humble opinion. ;)

Btw.. I didn't even know you guys were on this server or that I was registered until I looked at the Guilds on Mal since I just created a """"toon" - I AM A GIGANTIC ANIMU NERD!!!" - Aiell - here. So I though I would say hi and I saw this great thread..lol I dont even know what time zone this server is on, what is it?

Sup Jerks? :D

Good thread.

My observations as a feral raid druid are that they offer a huge amount to the raid if used in sparing quantity. I'll go so far that I think that at least one feral druid and perhaps several with hybrid resto/feral specs are better for a raid in many situations than all resto-heavy druids.

I am pretty confident that I can add more to an AQ40 raid as feral than I would as resto for every fight except Huhuran. In most fights, I can find a place to min/max a pull or boss fight by doing the right thing at the right time. It is about matching the limitations and strengths of the build to the needs of the raid.

If you have a sharp feral druid they can always be doing something very effective. There is no need for downtime for a hybrid class in most fights. They can convert either mana, energy. or rage into useful quantities (heals, DPS, or aggro) at any time. The same can be said of a 20/31 build. They both can fill hybrid roles if needed.

The heavy feral spec can approximate primary DPS and tankage with secondary healing. The 20/31 can approximate primary healing, mana battery, and either secondary tankage or DPS depending on the specific hybrid. The talents available to a druid for either feral or resto are exceptional. You gain a good chunk of specialization in either direction if you spend the points. Which one works best depends on the raid mix and the encounter.

I think that more than a few feral druids will be sub-optimal. Too much flexability can result in a drop in core abilities for the raid.

The biggest challenge for a feral druid is knowing when to do what. Tank? DPS? Heal? Regen mana in bear while keeping an emergency taunt/rage ready for use? CC? A large array of options. A lot of ways to either excel or make the wrong call. Raid-feral is a challenging role that requires a fairly specific type of player to shine. It can fall flat on its face if you can't adapt on-the-spot.

Excellent thread. Thank you, EJ (and everyone who contributed). I enjoyed the read. I was a feral druid for a long, long time. I've since chosen the path of a warrior for my own reasons, but I'll add what little I can to the thread. :) What makes a superior druid imo and ime is about doing the right thing at the right time. Mostly it's healing, but it's always about doing what will make the raid successful in the encounter. Sometimes it meant stepping up to replace a tank we didn't have in a given MC/BWL raid. Other times it meant going catform on Vael because we were short rogues back Vael pre-timer removal. In the end role mattered less to me than knowing what to do when and being able to do it. Feral with some points in Resto gave me the tools to do that. Eventually it just becomes a part of you. So be nice to your druids, treat them well, and expect nothing short of excellence from them.

/end_rambling



Ps. Tanking Onyxia is much more fun as a druid ;)

Nice thread.

As a Feral druid tanking/DPSing/healing in MC, I want to add one more aspect in favor of Feral druids:

Healers and Tankers burning out due to farming runs.

Indeed, after farming MC for a while our tanks are getting bored of doing the "tank" job every run on known bosses. So they are always very happy for a Feral druid to tank so they can go DPS.

The other way round, for druids that are on healing duty all the time, it's a nice change to be tanking or DPSing from time to time. We even "force" holy/disc priests to DPS from time to time to avoid burn out and let them see another side of their char in raids.

Just didn't want to see this discussion fall off the first page. :rolleyes:

It wouldn't actually be that hard to create a Moonkin tank encounter - and we almost had one. What makes warlocks viable tanks on the Twin Emps encounter?
1) you can't physically melee the magic emperor
2) the magic emperor does a lot of magic (resistable) damage

Imagine if that were changed a bit to a boss who:
1) you can't physically melee - making it hard for a Warrior to hold aggro
2) does massive physical damage - making a warlock or any caster other than a Moonkin druid (and maybe a Shaman although I expect Paladins would have a hard time of it) a poor choice of tank

Throw in some trash mobs to give the rogues and warriors something to do other than sit on their asses through the whole fight and you have a viable Moonkin
(yes, I know some guilds manage to get through the twin emps encounter with just Warrior tanks only but if you look at the rest of AQ with all of its tank transitions, this encounter seems designed for a transition from Warrior to Warlock and back again. It wouldn't surprise me if Blizzard was thinking about reducing the emps initial proximity aggro a bit to force the transition similar to how they tuned the Fankriss encounter to futz up guilds that did aoe zergs).

Problem with that is that they tend to not require speccing a certain way to beat a boss, which is the way I think it should be.

There's also gear issues in that scenario. Both shaman and paladins get innate threat multipliers and can get decent +spell damage wearing their mail or plate sets.

A druid could only tank in that situation via pure damage, which kind of elimites wearing high AC leather.