North101

The easiest way to make all abilities useful for Druids/Shamans/Paladins would be to combine Attack Power, Spell Damage and Healing (they have already done it with Spell Damage and Healing). This way we if we spec'd one way, our other spells and abilities would actually be useful in our other trees (though some spells will probably need rebalancing).

 

kalbear

Why? For feral druids that tank it is completely useless since it takes a GCD; you can't switch from bear form, cast it, and then return all in one cycle. For catform it's marginally useful but only just; there are very few times when casting an instant regrowth vs. casting a non-instant regrowth would matter at all. When are you using that instant nature of regrowth in PvE so much?

I agree that in PvP it is stellar, but you don't want to have a 2pT5 in PvP.

 

PSGarak

But every fire mage will make use of Blink (arcane) and Frost Nova (frost) in a wide variety of situations. Destro/DS warlocks still use lifetap, and at some gear levels Corruption (and we think dropping that is a major class issue). Holy priests use Fade in PvE. And so forth. Feral abilities are qualitatively harder to use for a non-feral druid than other off-spec non-damage utility abilities for other classes (although not impossible).

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Mijae

The only class skills I never use are Soothe Animal and Claw. Of course, some have limited use to PvP or PvE only. Healing is a given for all. As a feral even Starfire/Wrath can be used on mobs like the flyers before Supremus and scouts in Sunwell, or Moonfire to finish off a running target. There's already been examples given of using feral skills for both balance/resto in PvP. You can list any uncommon ability uses for other class specs and I can give uncommon ability uses for any of ours. Just because you choose not to use them does not mean they aren't available.

While I would love to have all abilities affected by the same stats, it would take a LOT of tweaking to not make us OP. They already have to reduce our usefulness by giving us crap for itemization.

The 2t5 bonus was HUGE at it's time. Back in arena S1 it was very much worth using over PvP 4pc gear imo (with some exceptions, like flag running). Compared to S2, it is a bit tougher call. With NI changes and S3 (soon to be S4) items available, the bonus just isn't worth keeping now. As with any item or set bonus, eventually there is something better (otherwise it gets nerfed). Until you could get 2t6 it was very much worth using 2t5 in PvE as well. I would gladly give up the +resil bonus on PvP gear for the 2t5 bonus. I don't see why they can't add special bonuses to more single items like they do PvP gloves.

 

Balancemoon

but when I said they used 98%-100% of their abilities, I meant even the most rarely used ones have a time when they are useful and thus count them. I pointed out that smite for the shadow priest was one that you could class nearly useless because shadow priests never used it, but it's only one ability, and you can live with that, but it's a completely different thing if 2/3 of the holy tree was like smite, you see what I mean? for balance druid's for e.g 2/3 of the feral tree is just like smite, so we're not just talking one ability but MOST of the feral school that never gets used.

I know probably many of you play druids and re-spec to try other builds, I levelled one in each build, and what I'm wishing to re-capture for the balance build is what it's like level 20-50, where you do use your nukes but do occasionally melee also, in the early levels you did melee for damage when you were OOM if you levelled balance, however it's different at end-game, all your damage is from nuking which I think is fine. So if you want that totally versatile experience, you must find another reason for balance to melee other than to do damage, because it is well sorted, something like getting mana regen for meleeing in a feral form so once every 10 odd mins of nuking, it actually pays to shift to cat and bear and melee for aboutu 10-15s as an alternative to drinking, that is just one way you could do it, there are many ways you could just get that bit actually involved.

For restoration, I remember the pre-TBC days when 0/20/31 was very much useable and viable, not that the point is to make the feral tree viable for resto more as into once more have the feral SCHOOL of more use. Doing +healing gear with +damage has made the only realistic damage option for resto shaman and resto druids as elemental and balance respectively, freezing out the enhancement and feral schools. For Shaman it's not so bad because most enhancement abilities are totems and utilities anyway, but for druid, most feral abilities are actually abilities. Where balance has no use for doing more melee damage, restoration actually does, so it's fix is much simpler fif blizzard cared about maintaining the diversity.

All said and done, they should look at all the classes from this perspective, it can only help improve design and experience.
But then I think it appears like that, but if they actually tried it won't be that hard. As it stands feral is fine if attack poweer/spell damage and healing were unified, you'd have to remove NI as it would have no relevance anymore, but if you can get +damage/healing in equal quantities on gear, why not +attack power/healing as a standard stat? What makes it fine on shadow priests or elemental shaman but overpowered on enhancement shaman, ret paladins or feral druids? in fact why not unify the stats for all three and make up the difference in the co-efficients, you reduce the complexity in generating most items of gear and finally your alternative roles as shaman/palas and druids see a bit more light of day because of their boosted power HOWEVER, it won't make much of a difference.

1. Balance even with spell crit also being melee crit and spell power also being melee power, would do about 1/3 of it's spell damage while meleeing, so altho it's meleeing will now be a lot more powerful than it is currently it means nothing: remember the fire mage using frost spells analysis made earlier? The same carries true for Feral druids who's attack power would also mean their spell damage was boosted, you won't see them relying on starfire and wrath now would you, but you may see them use the only two balance spells that are useless to them a tad more often. Same with Enhancement on ELemental, and Elemental on Enhancement, Enhancement has no melee ability that's trainable, Stormstrike is the only one and for shaman you need alot of points in Enhancement, however your shocks as enhancement will do more damage, but still no where near elemental shaman damage even though you will use them. I think the game can live with that and compensate for it.

What you will achieve though is finally people might start toying with the idea of Feral/balance specs once more or enhancement/Elemental specs..we see a lot more of enh/ele specs than we do feral/balance or balance feral. But to make balance TALENT TREE more attractive to feral you'd have to do something like this mock tree.

War Tools :: Talent tree Druid trees with full synergy between each tree

check out also what Feral can do for balance, but note it's just to show a way you could boost this viability between the two schools if you made feral forms give mana on melee to balance druids. Off course it would be a balance talent that allows you to gain mana from meleeing in feral forms, making most of the Feral school useable even though very occasionally. The feral tree could then have bits in it for balance that made mana on melee in forms actually useable in raids.

2. Healing specs will have attack power to use so holy paladins would do melee, or resto druids would be able to melee a bit..erm...seeing that currently you already allow them to be able to nuke a bit thanks to the healing gear change, I'm sorry what's so bad about making them able to melee, afterall a resto druid is either meleeing or nuking, and with this change, he at least will have as a good reason to off-spec feral instead of balance, which choice he makes would depend on which playstyle he prefers. And don't say that would make the existin x/11/4x resto spec even more popular, because a) that's not a bad thing at all and b) the reason for it's popularity is going because Feral charge is now at 20 pts.

3. As addressed earlier, what is so imbalanced about a melee based dps class build having his gear boost healing as well as attack power? afterall we don't consider shadow priests also a dps class to be imbalanced because it's gear also boosts healing, the damage and healing number being the same, neither do we complain that a mage's +spell damage gear boosts all his schools and not just the one he specs in. Off course we do, just like shadow priest healing is quite poor without holy talents, like wise will enhancement shaman or feral druids or ret paladin healing be poor even if it was just one unified stat.

So, my conclusion is it actually wouldn't be that complicated to do, just adjust the co-efficients so there is higher plus healing healing specs gain from the gear. However, note that just a power stat unification will not make balance druids use the majority of their feral cat/bear form abilities as they don't need feral for damage you'd have to give that particular build some incentive to melee once in a while, something that helps casting like getting mana back on meleeing so once in a while it benefits their role to shift and melee a bit. Fortunately Enhancement shaman don't have that problem, all elemental abilities with the exception of lightning bolt itself sees use by enh shaman, and as mentioned before, elemental shaman always have use for enhancement abilities as they are all utilities. Just the balance / feral relationship mainly.

Do this and you complete the druids, they finally have the last jigsaw piece fixed.

 

Valerian

Let see then feral spells that are "useless" for balance:
Maul
Swipe
Claw
Ravage
Shred
FB
Tiger's Fury

Marginally useful abilities
Rake/Rip/Lacerate (a bleed on rogue to keep from stealthing)
Frenzied regen (pretty poor but if you're oom and need SOME healing it could help)
Demo roar (while it may have its uses, its probably not generally worth the time to use it)
Growl (panzerkin? probably pretty useless)

Abilities of use:
Pounce (free stun opener, not on the same Dr as oomkin stuns)
Bash (another free stun)
Enrage (used to get the bash/lacerate off immediately)
Dash (faster burst of speed can always help, faster than travel form, can be used when stealthing)
Prowl (stealth can always be handy)
Maim (interrupt and disorient)
Travel form (clearly useful)

Gives me 7 useful abilities (not including the actual forms themselves, only dire bear has inherent "use"), 6 of marginal use and 7 that are essentially "useless" (I dont think I missed any off the top of my head). Thats firstly far from the entire tree and secondly its probably on par with what other classes take from at least one of their off-spec trees.

 

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.

 

Balancemoon

Valerian, no other class sees 13 abilties from an entire school being effectively useless all the time, 6 is far too large a number the most any have is 1 or 2 that they NEVER really use, and many classes have no abilities regardless of spec that they never use, only druids, in particular balance druids, and we're talking uses in ALL aspects of the game now, PvE, PvP, pvE solo, pvE raids/groups, PvP BGs..I hope they'd eventually make it more versatile.

Anyway back to more WotLK, here is an FAQ from Starla I lifted off wikidot on Feral abilities:
Lock Jaw
Q: How does Lock Jaw work?
A: Lock Jaw is a finishing move that causes periodic damage and stuns the target for 1+x seconds (where x is the number of combo points available). It is essentially Kidney Shot.

Lock Jaw follows the fine Druid tradition of causing a bleed effect. This bleed is affected by Mangle and Primal Aggression and is likely affected by other things I have forgotten to mention. Maim of course is not broken by the effect. The periodic damage effect currently lasts as long as the stun is active, however this is likely a bug and the duration will likely settle on either 12, 18, or 21 second durations as is consistent with other periodic damage effects in World of Warcraft.

Feral Charge
Q: How does Feral Charge work when used in Cat Form?
A: It works much like Shadowstep. Currently it doesn't have an animation and bugs out on most private servers as a result, however in the alpha, your character teleports behind the target in a similar fashion to the aforementioned Shadowstep ability. Rather than adding a combo point, it dazes the target for 3 seconds so that you won't lose them after you use the cooldown. This is an important difference between the Rogue and Druid versions of this ability, as the Druid one actually makes it much easier to keep on the target.

Using Feral Charge in any form activates a shared 15 second cooldown on both abilities.

Beserk
Q: How does Berzerk work?
A: Berzerk works just like the description says and there are really no hidden caveats here. It is worth noting that if you have the King of the Jungle talent, using Berzerk (Cat) in conjunction with Tiger's Fury will give you three Mangle attacks right out of the box. Correct usage in time with your energy ticks could result in three Shreds, however I am not math-inclined and do not know if this would result in an increase in DPS.

Using Berzerk in any form activates a shared 2 minute cooldown on both abilities. You will never be immune to CC for 40 seconds. Nice try, though.

Other
Q: Are there any changes to other trees that affect feral druids?
A: There are a few additions, including Master Shapeshifter which is an additional 4% free critical strike for Druids in Cat Form. That brings your total up to 15% crit (I think) from talents alone, which is a very nice total.

Omen of Clarity is now passive, which is nice. In addition, Furor will no longer activate a server-side check, meaning you have nearly instant access to Feral Charge when shapeshifting (obviously, this still activates a server-side check).

Q: Any other things that might affect PvP?
A: Druids do not regenerate mana in forms as of 8391. This could be a bug, but there is no official note about it either way. There were a few technical changes to the way mana is regenerated in 8391 according to a source of mine, so it is possible that there is a missed connection to the way Druid mana recovery works in forms.

This could be a good place to note that Feral Druids are currently monsters at 75 in what little PvP there is to be had. With 2800 AP in bear (the Druid in use has good gear), I am able to crit for about 2600-2700 at key points with Maul, and about 2200 with Mangle (Bear) on low-armored targets. In addition, the Sweeping Strikes effect on Berzerk is absolutely incredible in group PvP situations for a variety of obvious reasons.

The efficiency nerf to Druid spells is hurting Feral Druids a lot as Intellect is still a secondary consideration on Feral Druid gear. I would like to see a buff to Heart of the Wild, but time will tell.

*****************************************************************

Feral has great burst potential, but sustainable damage? scaling? well don't even go down the scaling route till we know more about the gear. Tiger's Fury looks good for sustainability, and now that Rake gets a damage boost it's looking to be back in the cycle. There is no real sustainable dps jump, well some more crit here and there etc, leads me to think that rogues will be similar, they'd probably give combat a bit more burst and Assassination enough to at least not be considered the "inferior" spec. We'll see.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Balancemoon

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.

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.

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.

 

Mijae

There are a few issues getting mixing together.

First, I'm all for coming up with unified stats. I've always complained about that. Why they keep coming up with more just compounds the problem. Why does "+attack power" exist when strength already effectively does the same thing? Why does +mp5 exist when spirit does? Why not combine both spell penetration and armor penetration into a single rating system that applies differently to each? Why use crit rating and dodge rating, because they thought it's too powerful to put equal agility on an item that gives both? If ratings are meant to be common between class types and stats vary based on class specific conversion factors, how can they expect similar class types to share items? Yeah, there's lots of stuff Blizzard could fix about itemization.

Druid and Shaman the only classes that have 3 very different trees (heal/melee/spell). Druids are further restricted by our form usage. How do you propose to have feral abilities shared by balance... allow them to be used in moonkin? Our special abilities are specific to our forms and that's NOT going to change unless we turn into shaman. The only way our form abilities could be equally useful is if all caster/melee stats were unified and the shapeshift mana cost was removed. Then, it would still depend on your spec. You would still expect a full balance spec druid to be less effective at melee. So why melee at all? The reason is generally not for damage, it's the special side effects like bleeds, stuns, etc. If that's the case then unified stats don't matter, it's just the shapeshift cost.

I don't understand exactly what you want changed. To have unified stats for just the class, but not through talents like NI? To have higher melee damage when you go OoM? To have feral talents increase moonkin melee ability? Just feral talents to regenerate mana? Bonuses like 2t5 but for spells instead of heals?

 

Balancemoon

This is where you're getting me wrong, I don't want all the abilities to be equally useful at all, I just want us to still have some use for all our abilities, as a balance druid, you should have little use for a lot of feral abilities, not all but many, but it should not be as it now where you have no use for at least 6, extremely low use for another 7. As a balance druid, casting is your strength, and that's what you do, however it doesn't mean feral forms should become useless for it, you are a druid afterall, this is the most unique aspect to your type of dps caster, even though it is something you really use, you're a spell caster that occasionally uses melee forms to combat, just like a fire mage on rare occasion will use frost spells, and more frequently arcane spells. As a developer you should give it some use to balance for spell casting seeing that in the current set up, doing melee with it is useless.

You don't have to have a unified stat to make this work, although a unified stat would help all the cross rolling without imbalancing or overpowering anyone. It's not a unified stat I want but a more complete playing experience with the druid that I get with all my other classes. Especially when I'm in the balance build. At the moment the Feral build is the only druid build that experiences and uses most of the class. This is how it should be for balance. Resto is slightly different in that you can choose to damage via feral or via balance and spec accordingly, except that the recent change to +healing ruined that and made it far more beneficial to get your damage via balance.

I like using my class to it's max potential, it's part of the fun, I can do that with every other class, and while each build in each class will have some abilities in other schools that aren't used often, the thing is they do have uses in circumstances you get to experience, each build has about 1 or at most 2 they very very rarely use, and that's about it. Some off more of their other abilities a bit too stale and a little help should be given there, but by far wrose off is the druid situation precesly for the reasons you said.

 

blackmatt

I'm still not sure what you're getting at, to be honest.

You keep comparing balance druids using feral abilities to fire mages using frost/arcane abilities, but don't you already do that? Don't you switch to travel form just as often as a mage blinks? Or go Bear to bash as often as a mage uses frost nova? Don't you switch to cat to prowl while you're soloing or pvp-ing? Just because you don't use the feral abilities doesn't mean that it's a fundamental design flaw, that's like saying a full fire mage should have reason to use arcane missiles over fireball or something.


Also, in comparing a mage using a different school of magic to a moonkin using melee abilities in feral forms is apples and oranges. So called "pure" classes using different schools are just using different variations of the same things. A fireball is the same as a frostbolt, it just depends on which school the mage puts their talents in as to which one is their primary nuke. You can't compare a wrath to a claw with the same expectations because they are nothing alike. What you're implying is more akin to expecting mages to have some increased utility from whacking things with melee attacks, and I think we can all agree that is completely ridiculous in terms of the design of the class.


But anyway, this is all veering way off topic, so I'll end my post with a question about the talent trees. I'm trying to decide which talents are worth sacrificing for a raiding build with the expectation that a feral's role in raids at 80 will be the same as it is now: excellent off-tank, very capable main tank if necessary or if the fight caters to more physical mitigation, and good dps in cat. I think I've figured out how to work in 2/5 feral aggression, 2/2 master shapeshifter, king of the jungle, primal precision, and primal aggression without sacrificing too much:

(link)




But if infected wounds works in pve, I have no idea where to get those three points. Any ideas?

 

Ja7us

This is quite awesome. I can't wait to feral charge from midair (I tended to die a lot trying this with the old furor - medium latency and plummeting from a great height do not mix).

 

Balancemoon

actually...it's not so bad if you're slowed because you can charge at least, both in bear and cat form, it is a bit annoying though losing the buff when you shift, just like it is losing your energy or rage. I still think that energy and rage should be able to accrue in the background and that shifting to cat form made to cost that extra 40 energy that Furor will givbe back. At least when moving in between forms you don't lose your rage or energy.


It is also interesting the new Primal Aggression, should help you use rake a bit more also, as you'd have built up combo points, and if no bleeds are on the target, you'd need it to start bleeding to make full use, the ONLY active build not requiring a combo point is rake.

 

Vair

Berserk gives the unstoppable until killed thing so I don't think you need to worry about shifting.

 

TimWischmeier

From a PvE pov I think Master Shapeshifter is not that good. Essentially, you pay 5 points for 4% crit in cat or 4% more threat in bear. While the latter may be good in some very specific circumstances (ie Brutallus), I think its a very costly talent, as 30% reduced shapeshift costs are essentially useless in PvE.


Edit notes: I just read, that Berserk increases total health by 100% in bear. Did they change that part of Berserk? That is quite a lot, but it does not work like Last Stand works. No additional health, which is lost at the end of the duration.