We're having some (limited) success countering MS warriors with feral druids and positioning. Though he isn't killing anyone, I admit that taking out the MS from the enemy team is a godsend. Cyclone lock the warrior from stealth while your team moves the fight away from where the warrior is. Then root him while your lock dots up everyone to force the paladin to burn GCD after GCD. Also bait the warrior by standing nearish him once the root or cyclone finally does break -- then go bearform and ignore him or start feral stunlock.

It takes a lot of teams by surprise, but when it works it does surprisingly well. Once the rest of your team has taken out the enemy's defensive dispelling, root and ignore the MS warrior and come in to help add DPS.

It's still a stretch and requires a decent amount of int on your feral gear.

Not quite true, the health bonus for Dire Bear is 25% additional *stamina*

Feral druids are going to have an additional 23% stamina from HoTW and SoTF

Thanks for a detailed review on what you've seen work, but I think this here is probably the major factor in your success. In games where I don't get focused it's great, I can really do a lot of CC and take multiple enemies out of the fight. Matches where I do get focused though, I'm pretty much completely shut down.

This was the problem I ran into at the higher end 2k+ when I was feral. Teams would simply not just leave me along. *But you can just shift out of snares!* ... it also costs alot of mana *going down thank god*. Having a team that would jump from one target to the next in a split second usually meant bad times for me in cat form. Perhaps its because having no warrior on my team its much tougher that some other feral druids who get to take advantage of MS debuff but we just couldn't burn through people anymore.

I am now pvp-resto and its working pretty good. Spam cyclone on rotation. Have some instant heals for burn-fests. Can play the interrupt game on a healer if needed. Cyclone - > Cyclone -> FC -> Bash -> Cyclone -> FC when its up again and so on is pretty fun.

My problem now is we are running pally - druid - shadow priest - mage - hunter... if I get someone on me forced bear, and our pally gets cced ... its bye bye hunter/priest.

Anecdotal evidence and personal feeling on it can only go so far. The statistics clearly show that Balance is the worst primary tree for PvP while Resto is the best. Some are making Feral work. Druids are underplayed in the arenas, and that cannot be explained away by overall population (proven by how common horde paladins are). We know the statistics so the question is why things work out that way and what we can do short of rerolling to be as effective as possible.

More armchair theory from someone with a lousy 5v5 record but a lot of research:

Balance doesn't bring much to the table that Resto or Feral can't do. They have a little more mana for Cyclone/Roots but they need that mana if they're going to do any damage. That need for mana also limits their ability to heal to equal or greater extent than a Feral. Cyclone from Moonkin for is really not all that more useful than Cyclone from caster...the armor does nothing against spell damage, doesn't stop stuns, and as has been pointed out is not all that high.

As far as Feral experience it does seem that having a Warrior in the group is key. There are very few exceptions to the standard that to be effective in 5v5 you need a Warrior and a Paladin. The only top ranked team without Warrior/Paladin is Clan Hex which is heavily stacked with spell damage and CC.

Leleth: Thanks for your insight on how it's working for you. You make a lot of good points about how a druid can be a better fit for the right group than certain other classes and can be effective. I think shifting costs are a key holding us back which makes Staff of Natural Fury important and Natural Shifter a key talent. It seems your experience also suggests that for a Feral to be effective it really helps to have Warrior/Paladin/Priest or Resto Shaman/Hunter or Mage to go with him. With the key roles all covered by someone else the ferals ability to adapt comes into play.

Do you find that Innervate is a nice addition for the team in longer battles or do you need to use it yourself just to keep functioning?

Innervate
is nearly 100% used on our Shaman. Purging+Totems ontop of healing eats up tons of mana.
Staff of Natural Fury helps me out a lot. I think I used innervate on myself once in 5on5 and once on the hunter.
But Innervate is pretty lackluster for a 6 minute cooldown. No one uses spirit for pvp healing and therefore it only delivers about 2k mana. Much better than nothing tough

My mana problems heavily depend on 2 factors
a) how often am i forced to bear
b) how often am i forced to break snares/roots (prevent hunter fear)
usualy I am low at the end but rarely do I need to actively wait for my spirit to regenerate me enough mana to operate.

I totally expected resto to be the cookie cutter druid spec for high level arena play but, to my surprise according to http://www.geekboys.org/arena/ most of the druids are actually specced feral.

I guess the survivability of feral (or the lack-of in resto) makes it a superior spec to cast cyclone.

@pvp movies
A very good feral-pvp movie is "deep feral 4". It contains 50% arena and about 30% 5on5 arena.

Thanks for all the posts guys. I have to admit I felt very dishearted by the state of my druid for the Arena. so disheartened I even tried Lord of the Rings Online. Fortunately that game showed to me how polished WoW is so I am going to make a comeback.

My problem is I am OFTEN focus fired. Healers cannot keep me alive, even in bear form with 15k armour and 13k life. I tend to drop rapidly. If I do not get focused on and one of the 2 healers is instead, I find myself switching to caster to help heal the healer. My mana drops very rapidly and our 2 remaining DPS cannot do much of a dent, so once I run oom, our healer drops and we are left with 1.5 healers and 2.5 DPS against a team of 5.

I often wonder if my healing is waste of mana and I should simply cyclone a DPS to ease the pressure off for the other healer to heal instead. I will watch those videos and see what others do in similar situations. Cheers!

By cycloning their ms warrior you effectively prevent more damage than you could heal.

"Deep Feral 4" is indeed a good video, i especially like how often he uses cyclone to "preserve" a BoPed target and then finish it. I often tried that but never brought it to that perfection.