Balancemoon

You forgot to read the rest of hte King of the Jungle talent. It also causes your Tiger's Fury to grant 60 energy.

 

Mijae

There are a few choices that will need to be made at 80, but you can get pretty much all the essentials for both bear and cat. I'm currently working on updating my spreadsheet to support the new talents. I am seeing a very large issue of having a build to support both at 70 though. This is assuming they introduce the talents before the expansion, similar to what they did for TBC.

The main problem is that while Berserk is a great talent, I don't see it's usefulness equal for bear and cat. It's great for burst damage (mostly PvP). A 5 minute cooldown means you'll really only get to use this once, maybe twice on a boss in PvE. The immunity effect is really best for PvP and somewhat for tanking. The use for bear is absolutely huge and gives us a much needed active tanking "oh-shit" ability. The primary issue is giving up OoC for it. It will turn out to be a noticeable sustained cat dps loss. This will especially be true the closer the duration of a fight gets to a multiple of 5 minutes (ie, 2 uses in 6 minutes is much greater than 1 use in 5). We also have a large decision between Natural Shapeshifter and Primal Aggression. For those who powershift heavily, mana management might become an issue (and a dps loss) as well.

If they do introduce talents before the expansion we definitely will see optimal bear and cat specs clearly diverging.

No I didn't. That just says Tiger's Fury works while enraged, it doesn't say anything about the bear "Enrage" ability being usable in cat. As the wiki stated, the "Berserk" ability counts as enraged. Has anyone read a change to "Enrage" to make it usable in cat?

 

Balancemoon

When you go into a beserk or bestial wrath, the troll racial and similar abilities, a general term used to describe all thes states is enraged, beserk for e.g, is a specific type of enrage wherein you cannot be impeded by CC. Although the same word is used for the bear ability Enrage, it is not that that is referred to in the tooltip. Basically when you activate Tiger's Fury, the druid cat is described as being enraged.

The tooltips can sometimes be confusing, however the bear ability is only useable in bear form. The cat form version is called Tiger's Fury and instead now grants 171 at final rank to your attacks. Has a 30sec cooldown. Hope that helps.

 

Mijae

Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. Does Tiger's Fury always give extra 60 energy if you have the talent and is completely unrelated to being enraged? If so, they really should reword the talent description to make it clearly 2 separate thoughts.

 

blackmatt

But king of the jungle doesn't say anything about berserk. It says while enraged in bear/dire bear you gain 15% damage and tiger's fury instantly generates 60 energy in cat.


Are you just assuming they mean berserk instead of enrage, or do you know from experience that's what the tooltip means?

 

Mijae

No, I just misread the tooltip and what was posted by others who do have experience with the alpha. I was only ever reading about the Tiger's Fury bonus from King of the Jungle used at the same time as Berserk. I was interpreting it similar to what Balancemoon stated about how many abilities count as an enraged state and tried to figure out what types of enrages are available to each form. I did not read any kind of break in thought between the bear form and cat form descriptions and assumed both were related to being available only while in an enraged state.

I got it now... They really should change it from "when Enraged" to "your Enrage ability". Then they wouldn't need to even mention the stupid both "Bear form and Dire Bear form".

 

Balancemoon

To be honest, Infected wounds and Feral charge in cat form are for me what's most exciting. I also love what Beserk will do also I would hope for a shorter cooldown.

Now if only they could change the cosmetics of the forms, allow you to optionally show an armoured version of the forms, and also to be able to use different animal skins. For e.g. you could emulate any in-game Ursine based creature for bear form. For Cat form any Feline based creature, they could add Canine/Lupine also it's Shaman more that have the wolf thing

 

Therulnig

From the talent calculator currently up for Ferals it seems there area a few choices to be made now, whereas in the past you could take basically anything you wanted from Feral for DPS or Bear Form.

I don't think its radical enough to say DPS and Tanking will be totally different specs now though. I see more of a difference between PvP and PvE talents more so than bear or cat talents.

In Resto you can still pick up everything, its just 16 pts (due to new talent you don't want to pass up) instead of 14 pts.

In Feral if you are assuming PvE (where you can give up things like Brutal Impact and Primal Tenacity without missing them), theres really only 4-5 pts still that are debatable as to where they go, that means 2 talents max you'll miss.


Infected Wounds looks easy to skip in PvE since I don't know its synergy with DK's, or how many encounters will favor having it. You can bounce the others around - Assuming King of the Jungle applies to the Berserk ability, someone would have to thoerycraft the effects of taking 2/3 of it instead of 3/3 - I'm willing to bet in the long run you don't lose much. Pred Instincts you could go 4/5 of to free a point up, and so on and so on. You can make it work.

 

Phorage

Rumors say that the armor gained from Imp. Tree Form stacks with buffs and enchants. Anyone knows if this is true and also if this might be the case for Dire Bear Form as well? Might explain the removal of Reinforced Hide talent I guess.

 

Jone

The reference I've seen to that says it was done on a private server, so my guess is the private server was sloppy about armor mechanics.

 

Balancemoon

I shall enquire from someone who has access to the actual ALpha, it would be sooooo cool it this was true. Certainly lend more weight to those Priest and Shaman abilities that give armor, although it would be good if they added a general damage mitigation that was outside the normal cap, or at least buffs could allow your Armor reduction to be higher than the normal cap, by temporarily extending the cap for their duration to 80 maybe even 85 or 90% if you were already maxed out on armor.

 

Apaine

And make rogues itch with excitement when they apply their 3k expose armor on you? On that private server, expose armor reduced tree's armor from 16k to just under 6k. If it were to apply to bear too, then no rogue would loose to a feral druid anymore in PvP.

Except for armor patches, there aren't too many buffs that increase armor. Only one I can think of is MotW. I'd rather have the old behaviour of natural armor only... rather than giving warriors and rogues a free ticket to killing us via sunder armor and expose armor.

 

Duilliath

Reminds me of the old bug where Sunders and Expose Armour indeed reduced base armour instead of final armour.

That one was fixed quickly enough.

 

smellme

Have you ever actualy done pvp against a BM hunter and his pet? you cannot slow the pet or the Hunter:

Chill effects
Crippling poison
Frost shock
Grounding totem
Hamstring
Wingclip

And many others, please explain to me why a BM hunter or their pet cannot be slowed then? is it a bug or is it because "cannot be stopped" means you cannot be slowed also?

You decide there champ.

 

Apaine

Let me add Enrage has very short cooldown too (1 min?)... so adding cat utility to that when combined with enormous 60 energy from tiger's fury would be a huge boost to dps on demand..

 

Tembetyu

The Berserk talent reads the same as the BM hunter talent, meaning you're immune to slows like wing clip, frost trap, etc.

Also of note is that on top of the decreased energy cost/increased targets hit it gives you 30% more hp in both forms. I could see the buff being present when you change forms between cat/caster/bear.

 

◊ Merple

Random thought, but I'd really like a change to Innervate that extends to include Rage and Energy as well. I think it would really extend the possibilities of the skill to allow for burst threat, burst DPS, and of course, reloading a mana bar.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

• sadris

I think making it useful for all mana-using classes should come first. Only 2 classes actually have spirit on their gear. Making it work like mana tide would be a big improvement (% of overall mana).

Plus PVP gear has no spirit =(

 

Nitz

Feral tanking seems even more directed toward high-threat tanking with King of the Jungle, Primal Aggression and Imp. Mangle (Mangle > Lacerate/Swipe > Lacerate/Swipe > 0.3 sec > Mangle). Adding a 6% SotF and negating our need of crit-caping (thus adding even more health or threat), I think bears will have a pretty good time on non-gimmicky encounters (read: primary physical damage, no Shear-like abilities).

EDIT: Not to mention the 4% damage of Master Shapeshifter !

 

Ja7us

Unless it was 100%+ mana gained over the duration, this change would be a nerf to innervate when used on PvE Druids and Priests, though.

 

• sadris

Priests and Druids haven't had mana problems since the 2.4 regen changes, so its a moot point.

Has there been any word on an increase in the base threat caused in bear form? Warriors get +15% for free (previously a talent).

 

Mijae

4% damage != 4% threat

 

Oaken

Well, certainly after the expansion it won't be a big deal. For anybody with a decent level of tanking raid gear you'll outgear any of the levelling 5-mans so you can level 70-80 focused on kitty dps for soloing and the probably use the same spec just fine for instancing.

Pre-xp it isn't likely to be a big deal either, at least not if you are in Sunwell. Unfortunately the isntances are so tight in terms of tuning I'm seeing pretty much zero action as cat-dps because we just can't come close to what you need for Brut, etc. So if the talent trees come out prior to WotLK it will be tanking talents to the end of the tree and then a quick respec the moment the xp hits.

 

Nitz

Since Feral Instinct is still there, I don't think we get a base threat increase after the 30% we already have in Bear Form.

 

• sadris