I would like to once again state an argument used by every side in the feral druid wars. Current Itemization cannot be used as a basis for determining Blizzard's intended role for a class. I don't really care what T4/5/Gladiators looks like statwise, what gear does, and what your class/spec wants it to do are rarely the same thing and you often have to make due with worse items and complain until Blizzard gets the hint (hunter bows, t1 vs t2 vs t2.5, feral items in Aq ...)

Like i said earlier, if you can provide me some reasons why Cat Form DPS won't stay relatively similar to a Fury/Prot Warriors DPS, I'm all ears. From my experiences to date, they have been very competitive. So Feral Druids at the moment are just as capable of justifying their spot in the same way a Fury/Prot Warrior justifies his raid place right now.

Irrespective of whether a Fury Warriors is top 2 dps or top 10, it doesn't change the basic fact that certain encounters in the game will require a minimum number of Tanks. Raid leaders are forced to build their raids around that tanking requirement. So, if you seem so determined to insist that Feral Druids won't have a place in raids, tell me what your Tanking makeup for a fight requiring 5 Tanks would be? Assuming of course that you will be using that same raid to kill the 'next' boss who requires only a single MT and an OT.

Are you honestly going to sit there and try and tell me that you think 5 Prot Warriors (or a combination of Prot/Fury Warriors) are going to be the best and only effective solution?

Where the fuck did I claim that Feral Druids are hands down better Tanks than Fury/Prot Warriors post 2.0.10? Honestly, my entire arguement has been that the tanking & DPS capabilites of Fury/Prot Warriors and Feral Druids should (assuming they get the balance right) should be overall very comparitable.

What is so wrong about Feral Druids being comparitive Tanking/dps hybrids as Fury/Prot Warrior?

I'm really not sure exactly what your arguement here is? Comparing 'raid wide' debuffs (that can be performed better by other classes and don't stack) with group party buffs doesn't seem like a valid comparison. If you really want to start looking at debuffs you best include the increased bleed dmg from mangle, and the advantages of Imp expose + FF vs Sunder + FF.
And the 'cost' of keeping expose/sunder up is minimal. I would even go as far as to say as minimal as the dps difference between Bear Tanks and Warrior Tanks ... i.e. minimal in the scheme of things.

You know what, truth be told there are just a few questions I would love to have answered.

• Can a feral dps/tank hybrid work. Will itemisation keep ferals as good enough offtanks so that there is no reason to use fury warrs over bears. No point to be good dps and not a viable tank when I could play my rogue and be superb dps.
• Does cat dps on the PTR in a RAID keep ferals worth it as a dps+utility spot. So if I cannot tank, will the DPS + innervate +spot heals be worth it over a pure dpser?

That is basically it. So ok, I cannot be a main tank. Fine. Can I still be a 1st choice offtank? well, at least to be no less effective than a fury/prot warrior or prot pally as an offtank.

These questions can really only be answered by someone on the PTR who has raided.

I played my rogue for 2 years. I am, to be quite frank, a bit bored now. Mutilate breathed some life back as I found a tasty PvE and PvP effective spec. Then I encountered some poison immune bosses and it was a bit embarassing to see myself so low on the DPS list.

If I could be a cat DPSer, Offtank when needed and genuinely be a good choice for a raid spot, I would be happy. It all depends on how effective the cat DPS still is I suppose. It also means I will not be taking my T4 or T5. I have no desire to be poor dps and ok healing.

So all whine and nerf crying aside, has anyone raided as a cat on the PTR? I am not overly fussed about the differences between cat/tank gear. As far as I am concerned if in a fight I need to offtank, then I will be using tanking gear, I will just go cat form, DPs and then switch to bear for when I need to pick up the add (or stay in bear and generate aggro ont he boss for fights like moroes etc). If I can DPS and will not need to offtank, it will be cat gear.

*edit*
And Stafu, despite the fact you are alliance scum and in Infamous =), you have really made me feel a lot better about keeping my druid around. Fights like magtheridon which need 5 tanks, maybe even 6 will really help ferals feel a bit more needed without being forced to massively stack a raid with warriors a la 4H. I now think I would be quite content being the equivalent of a fury/prot warr, just now need some assurances that our DPS side is worth it.

I think this would answer a lot of the speculation in this thread.

Afaik Cat Form DPS won't really change in 2.0.10. I've only raided a couple of times with our Feral Druid and he was doing really solid DPS. He beat me on 1 Aran attempt, i beat him on 2 others. It was close though.

I guess Fury DPS vs Cat DPS ... fury will be stronger (relatively) on fights with bonus dmg modifiers (thaddius/loatheb) and Cat DPS will be stronger (relatively) on fights where you can't consistantly dps the whole way though (twin emps, Mexnaa).

To answer the questions about the valiability of cat dps in raids,
I've been raiding as a feral now, my guild did some attempts on gruul *shiver* and we killed nightbane, just to give you a general idea of the progression.
If I'm dps'ing I'm up there in the top spots, even with some green items (see profile) that are in dire need of replacing I can keep up 600+ dps easely (unpotted), if I would have some more crit so I could make a reliable mangle/shred/shred/rip repeat at infinitum cycle, my damage would be even higher.
So yes, cat dps is very valiable right now, and after the patch my main focus will be on battlerezz/dps/innervate/offtank roles (in order of importance).

Oftanking mobs as gruul generally isn't a problem right now, but I'm sure it will be a problem to do it in full migation gear after the patch.

For ferals it will still be a must, I can't imagine not having it in raids to be honest, this is if you are expecting to do dps while not tanking. There is something to be said about a resto/tanking hybrid though, but it's just not my style. I would hate it to be a semi good healer and a semi good tank at the same time.

Some background.

I didn't get this game right at the start, I was a couple of months late.
This druid was my first character in an MMO, I chose druid as it sounded interesting and flexible from the very outdated much talked about incorrect description back in those days.
I soloed most of my way to 60, I started grouping for dungeons in my early 50's.
I have been specced Feral nearly always, the only time I wasn't was recently when I chose resto to help the raid learn BWL and then when I changed guilds so I could see Naxx before it was pointless.
While specced resto I lost all desire to play my druid, I would log on for raids and to pick a few herbs, that was about it.
I was one of the few druids, I expect, who had the old intensity talent. Anyone remember what it did without looking it up?

I ended up doing a fair amount of research on how druids worked as some of the stuff just didn't, the old talent trees had so many outright crappy talents I wanted to find out how they were supposed to work. The blizzard forums had some decent info back then, druids were such I minority class the signal to noise ratio wasn't too bad.
Initially I had about 34 points in the feral tree, I was a noob and looked at the trees and saw that feral had two 31 point talents, given the way the trees are structured in that taking a 31 point in one stops you getting anything past 20 in another I thought feral was the way to go as I could get two 31 point talents!
It also suited how I was playing, I used feral to kill things and then healed up shifted back and kept going.
In the end I respecced into a 0/27/24 build, all the stuff deeper in feral was not worth the investment and to play a feral druid how I liked I needed the rest in resto for the feral points in it at the time and it got me a few nice healing talents.
You can try and make up a build based on those trees by clicking on this line, it is basically what we had up until the 1.8 patch.
When I started grouping I was cat/OT a lot, I would also shift out and heal when it was needed. Cat damage wasn't as bad as people make out and bears have been capable tanks for a while too, but the small mindedness of other players limited the times you could play this way in groups without friends.
Eventually I found myself getting a bazillion tells for groups as a healer, I had no gear for it so I made some of the Runic leather pieces and upgraded as I got drops, I never changed specs and had no trouble healing except when people were idiots.
Looking back at those runs which were hard with the knowledge I have now it is obvious that spec was irrelevant to the problems as they were caused by shit players.

Given what I have done in the game and the amount of time I have spent playing my druid, currently 205 days, I think I have a pretty good idea of how the class works and what its limitations are. The only thing I haven't really pursued is the offensive casting side of things as it seems counter productive, to me, to use my mana to kill things when I can hit them instead and use that mana to heal.

Having said all that...
This is a horrible, horrible idea.
The old trees were setup like this and it sucked.

If they were setup like that you are speccing a hybrid into a specialist, what happens when the role of your hybrid is not needed for an encounter?
In some guilds you will be swapped out for a different class.
So whats the point in playing a hybrid if this happens?

If you like the idea of telling someone, "You have to leave the raid zone now as you are useless on this encounter because of your spec, Joe Bloggs is taking your spot.", then your idea will help that happen.
Personally I hate situations like that and don't plan on being part of a guild which would do it.

I think Blizzard is trying to make it so a raid can avoid swapping people out if the raid contains hybrids with the right skill, gear and spec to make it happen.
I think this has been possible for a while but the min/max crowd aiming for world/server firsts won't try it as what they are doing works, other guilds see this and just copy them.

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The changes currently on the test server are quite drastic, I am concerned at the size of the change they are making to bear form damage and threat in one go.
The best thing to do is to get on the test server and test them out, I have tried and subjectively it didn't seem to bad.
I have been unable to meet my friend on there for further proper testing.

• I think all of us agree that bear damage was silly, as long as they change threat so it is similar to a warriors I don't care about the damage.
• Most of us also agree that the change to 25% more stamina won't break us.
• The armour multiplier is upsetting a lot of people, I think we need to realise that being able to get to the cap so quickly after the introduction of an expansion was a mistake.
• There is a valid concern that there will be no upgrades for stamina and armour, all we can do is voice that concern and hope that Blizzard sees it and gets the message.

Thinking about the armour part, if they didn't reduce the multiplier they may have been put themselves in a situation where they couldn't actually give us upgrades because we could already reach the cap.
I think part of the reason, if not the main reason, for the 25% Health to Stamina change was because of the additional bonus we could get from Flasks.

What all the stat whiners seem to forget is that feral druids don't have any powerful cooldown abilities. You could argue Frenzied Regen is nice, and I'll give you "nice", but nothing more. Useful occasionally, when you have a full rage bar and you have to get some healing on yourself. Bash is a 1min cooldown for what seems to be the most evaded stun in the game. Enrage, 1min. Feral Charge, 15 seconds. But the forms lack the Lay on Hands, Shieldwall/Retaliation, Cold Snap, Preparation, elementals etc, even when specced deep into the tree.

Heck, there are no 5min standard cooldowns either. The ones like vanish, blind, divine shield, divine favor, blessing of protection, presence of mind, arcane power and the rest. There's no boosting your killing or survival ability, while all the other classes get powerful spells and abilities that can really turn the tide. Druid can shift out, innervate himself and get 2.5k mana for a couple more shifts, or start channeling a tranquility, only to be kicked or killed instantly. Of course, if the forms were powerful in their own right, there wouldn't be need for those abilities.

But, as people with little insight to their or others classes who only see yellow numbers on their screens get their way, druid won't be powerful in forms (cat too fragile, bear too weak), and it won't have the cooldowns to make any difference.

My point was that Bearform Damage, while it appeared high on damage meters, was actually identical (depending on raid makeup) to having a Prot Warrior tanking because of Sunder+Shout improving raid DPS by quite a bit more than FFF+iLotP does. And don't tell me that 15 rage or 5 combo points every 28.5 seconds is minimal, I know Fury Warriors aren't rolling in the rage anymore, every sunder is a good 300 damage lost and it's a hell of a lot more damage lost for rogues to expose. Same with being able to provede your own TC and Demo shouts.

Warriors buff/debuff, Druids DPS, the end RaidDPS was very similar.

And for the record, I'd have 1 paladin, and 1 druid put on tanking gear and spam taunt along with the 3 warriors I brought to the raid.

Honestly, I don't think Prot/Ret Pallies or Prot/Fury warriors are worth bringing to a raid, the job of OT can be done by anyone regardless of spec, and when the job is done I'll take someone who can DPS over someone that can't. I'm a min-maxer, I'd rather bring my 2/10 tanks 3/10 healers and 5/10 DPS and just be done with it, unless the fight only takes 1 tank, then I usually get another healer. It just seems retarded to me that Blizzard is forcing those 2 tanks to be prot warriors (1/27 of the player population) instead of including feral druids and prot pallies.

Heh, interesting distinction....

But it's true, I think that's what most of us are most shocked about. How could they get it so wrong?

Here's what some of us, me in particular, are really upset about. We've had maul and swipe for 2 years. Swipe got a very modest scaling buff a while ago, but it's been roughly the same. With WoW 2.0 we got mangle as a 41 point talent, along with other classes getting equally awesome 41 point talents.

And suddenly, we do too much damage with maul and swipe? WTF? We've had these moves for 2 years, and now they're getting nerfed? Not even talking about mangle here, just plain old maul and swipe. In the 2 years that druids have had these moves, has there ever been a concensus that maul and swipe do too much damage? Were druids ever considered OP in the 2 years prior to WoW 2.0?

So what happened? We got mangle, and we got gear, specifically cat gear. That's why maul and swipe, which we've had for 2 years, are getting nerfed.

You know who is really going to suffer from this patch? Hybrid druids, of the 30 feral / 31 resto variety. They don't even have mangle, but their maul and swipe is going to suffer.

Exactly, unless they really boost threat on base skills they are defeating the very thing Druids are supposed to provide - hybridity.

And yet in 2.0 that decided to gut that completely. Wasn't that long ago either. Who's the one thats really claiming the sky is falling here? Us or Blizzard's devs?

I particularly enjoying explaining to my nonunderstanding guildmates that my threat was *HIGHER* pre tbc then it ever is now, when they tell me how out of control it is/was.

The old maul was off the chain good. With just a bit of stacked AP/crit I'd wager level 60 ferals with old maul could out-aggro 2.0 level 70 druids. Maul was that good. It's a sad shadow of it's former self now, not to mention the complete gutting swipe has gotten. Removing the threat modifier isn't enough, now we need to nerf it's damage by 20% across the board and nerf the one idol that was semi-useful for tanking.

I'd like to see some math on threat/s and threat/rage for thunderclap vs. swipe post-nerf.

If the flat Damage * 2.5 = threat for TC is correct Then talented it's 615 threat vs 4 Targets every 4 seconds (why 4? that completely screws with any GCD cycle, may as well just say it's 4.5)

Swipe would have to do 424 damage to match that threat per use and can only hit 3 targets, but is completely spamable, so it only has to do 141 damage to match TC's TPS on 3 targets.

I'd say swipe still has the upper hand in rage rich scenarios.

While tanking Romulo last night, my dps is around the 160 mark. Normal raid buffs, no special consumables, and I have a TF, so I expect that a non TF user would be maybe 10dps less.

That seems to gel with numbers I recall from other raid instances like BWL/AQ etc.

So if we are saying that Swipe threat is going to be ok (or at least roughly equivalent to TC), then if Feral/Resto hybrid is to have any viability threat wise any threat buff for Bears will have to go back onto Maul or a revamped Lacerate that builds threat even agains bleed-immune targets (Mangle threat buff not viable for anything less than heavy Feral builds).

Of the two, Maul makes more sense as Lacerate is not available until very high character levels.

I don't think we'll ever get a straight answer as to why Bear damage was buffed so far in the first place.

Mangle was proven to be bugged in another thread. Was a few screenshots of it hitting for more than its max possible damage.

Even having said that, its max is still too high. I don't think any of us did not expect a damage nerf.

I looked at the thread on the druid forum and their math was flat out wrong. They were using 156% + 211 rather than the actual bonus damage for bear mangle which is like 281. That 70 damage easily accounts for the "bugged" mangles they were seeing.

Other than that they were trotting out screenshots of fighting that dog in shadowmoon that seems to have a physical damage multiplier or something - I got a 3700 ferocious bite on him, is FB bugged too?

Ummm. I do over 250dps in tank gear pretty easily. Shield slam alone is worth ~100+ dps. Auto-attack with battleshout up is around 160+ dps with my fireguard. Throw in heroic strike bonus damage, devastate, and revenge and you get some decent dps (especially with a shaman in your party).

Here's a fun little anecdote for you, my somewhat undergeared druid friend and I were running a heroic slave pens. We got to a pull with the 2 defenders, each of us tanked a different mob. Our dps was taking an afk break (pizza call) for a second so it was just him and I tanking the mobs to death with our 2 healers firing away. There was a little bit of ancillary dps from our healers, but he only killed his mob about 5% health ahead of mine. To quote my friend "and they say druids do more dps".

I'm not sure how my friend's tank gear compares to the other druids who are posting here (he does have good enough gear to offtank Karazhan), but the whole dps argument seems odd to me right now. He was kitted out for mitigation and endurance, so maybe there's ways you can tweak that to get more dps without losing a lot of mitigation. I saw a post that some of the Conquest bear tanks are pumping out 1400 tps. That indicates there's ways to tank and do more dps, especially when you consider I'm limited to about 1k tps in my "unlimited rage" karazhan cycles right now.

Rather than comparing current dps, I think the nerfs are related to the scaling of it in the future.

That's just it - warriors are used to progressing gear, in fact, its a non-questionable "issue" for you, while its a highly questionable and, judging on our previous experience from WoW 1.0, highly unlikely non-issue for us.

Even when we had some scattered epic upgrades (AQ 40) people were whinining on the official forums threatening to leave the game because "every drop in AQ is lolferal!11 zomg".

The point is, the real feral gear can only be feral, no other class can "share" what we need, this is if we are talking about getting the maximum out of items budgeting for a specific role in the raids. Half-thought rogue items that not even the rogues want? No thank you.

I hear you say "you have T4 T5" - well, no, we dont, at least for high end tanking it is just not enough. its not enough for middle-stray-off-the-road tanking either, unless you want to put too much strain on your healers. I am a healer and i know i can push myself over the limits for poor players and poorly equipped good players, but its not very pleasant.

Also, if Blizzard had feral upgrades in their minds when they did this, I am almost sure they would say something in that respect, at least to lessen the PR hassle on themselves. They said nothing - either they dont care, or they dont have anything. Pick your bet.

They have been handling this in the present tense exclusively: "we just found out your damage is too high, your armor is too high, your HP is too high, your threat is too high, your talents give too high a boost, your idol give too high a boost, your 41-point talent is in fact of a 71-point talent strength" there is no past (beta testing, anyone?) and there is no future (we're bears/cats, throw us a bone at least... "you get nerfed now, but im sure developers are working towards a solution that lets you get more powerful as you progress in the game" druids: "wow.. thanks!")

The clearest message they are sending is this: "Feral is for leveling - Deal with it".

edit: punctuation

This thread is too long. I'm closing it and creating a new one.