Tutanka

Well we dont really have a good first target (thats sort of the point of the team) however an OOMKIN with 15k amour and barkskin, seems a lot less apealing then a resto shaman.

I would say both have their effectivness reduced by a similar margin under pressure. Shaman can purge, buff, and shock (but not much healing), druid can cyclone, root and debuff (but not much DPS).

 

Agrippina

Resto shammys are awesome to focus fire - no instants once NS is popped and no CC's. Maybe it's because we only face teams in the 1800-2000 range but we love going after shammys first. A moonkin properly specced can keep cyclone/roots on his/her attackers pretty reliably, and has more armor to boot.

 

DecimusGarona

A moonkin can keep cyclone/roots on his/her attackers just as reliably as the shaman can heal himself - both use 1.5 second casts, and don't suffer spell pushback. A resto shaman with a large HP pool, natures guardian and earthshield up is also pretty difficult to take down, even with focus fire. Bloodlust can also make it very difficult to interrupt their heals.

 

Smilyfun

Replying to Solstives' questions:

First off, i prefer STR to AGL simply because with resiliance, and casters such as locks and priest stacking it, id rather hit harder more frequently than hit for less and have my crits hit less but a little more frequently. Ive always emphasized AP over Crit simply because constant damage > relying on crits. Agility has its bonuses when mobs dont have resiliance, and the AC gained by what i could put on my things would be next to worthless. The dodge is meh, melee arent what kill a feral in bear, its the casters, in which case, relying on your armor and dodge gives you about the same chances as a snowball in hell.

For the deep comment, give any feral that gear and he will play well, hes average, and nothing more, he just has superior gear than 90% of the druid population.

Next, to the playstyle. I havent changed my playstyle one bit since the patch when arenas first came out. Kitty unless their on me, bear when they are, cyclone to keep a caster out of DPSing, or a pally from BoPing if i see fit. Ignorance is bliss, use it to your advantage. When teams leave me alone in cat, anything with less than plate is going to get hit HARD and constantly, aint no way your stopping a feral when hes got a large enough mana pool.

For the preservation of BoPed targets, our priest always gets it off, so its never been a problem, and if so, its because hes getting hit by something really hard, in which case i cyclone one of their DPS. Cycloning a BoPed target also takes a player already out of the game, out of the game that much more, kind of redundant in some cases.

About my spec. First off, NG is worthless in the majority of any fight, if you use it in 5v5, whoever it procs on will get dispelled, grats. And for solo play, rogues will CoS, warriors get 10% health, and anything else is of no importance. I see it as a wasted point. On to NI, I solo play, ive always dont it, i always love it, and no good feral doesnt heal himself when hes in warsong, or in world pvp. Hoting myself up in warsong with the flag as im running down has saved my life on more than one occasion, so the talent is worth its weight and more. And yes, if your a feral and you EVER have to heal in your arena team if its 5v5, your destined for failure, or else the other teams REALLY suck. SoTF doesnt seem worth it to me, sure less crit, but i cant take points out of anything, its all essential and needed things. Everything has a use, and gives me some superior benefit than 3% chance to not get crit. My spec ahs been carefully crafted over the weeks and months, and everything i have is more beneficial than anything i dont have, and i build my stats the same way. Trial and error has proven time and again that for me, AP > Crit, and i focus on such. My spec is no Arena spec, and no Feral spec, and certainly no PvE spec. It's Smilys spec, and thus, it is catered to my needs and desires. You may stack agility and crit more, but when your crits damage gets kicked in the balls by resiliance, as well as your crit chance, ill be sitting there doing constant high DPS with larger crits. Also, ive got around 450+ healing with my normal gearset on for when i solo, and if you are a feral that doesnt heal and just stays in forms, kick yourself in the face, and delete your character, you are worthless

Now to Drole:

No, i never use tranquility, if im ever forced to heal, its already too late. Cyclone is the only thing i do out of form, MAYBE barkskin if theres time, which never usually happens. And to your earlier question, i have 2146 Self buffed AP with 31.23% chance to crit in bear form.

Ive been playing with these 4 individuals for atleast 6 months now, and we all kinda fit together, so our playstyles have melded into one solid thing in which a feral is of more benefit than a rogue, or another warrior, or a hunter.

-The Smily One

 

AnotherTrollHunter

I have a question regarding cyclone. Wasn't it fixed so that it didn't remove buffs anymore?
Today I experienced multiple times when the druid cyclone removed my trueshot aura.

 

CasT

Cyclone is supposed to deactivate auras (not buffs) when cycloned. The fix was to turn on auras which comes with the form, as treeof lol, boomkin and leader of the pack for example.

Do not matter how much you play, you will never get the carrot.

 

AnotherTrollHunter

So it is intended that I lose my aura every time?
Edit: Well, my aura is kind of a buff and an aura. It costs mana to cast, has a duration but effects multiple people so I could see why cyclone removes it. It sucks that the aura isn't restored afterwards.

 

Dev0

Right now I am so frustrated with WoW pvp as a Feral Druid I just don't even know what to do, I was finely really adapting to my role really well and now this pvp trinket change. I will go on record as saying I love the trinket change and think its long over due. However Cyclone now will give you next to no control over a paladins in arena's and Even more frustrating then all of that The Feral Range Bug, if they would just fix this I wouldn't ever complain again I have lost so many matches while being in the lead say vs a mage who's running away with like 2% life left and me never getting in range.

The Most frustrating part about it is Blizzard doesn't seem to want to admit its a bug, and I hate to be "one of those Druids" but I seriously just feel like giving up and canceling my subscription.

 

Kink

Last night I was chasing a mage too. My partner and the mages partner were dead. I got a heal off and was full life. The mage has a full ice barrier and 10% life left. I could only hit him when I was in front of him. I could be behind his toon, n his toon and still got the "you are out of range" message.

This is a VERY frustrating issue. Oh and I had 120ms. It was acting as if I have 1k+. Very frustrating. This to me is a major issue. If they have instant spells, all they need to do is run back and forth and it will negate a good 50% of my damage.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Solstice

To be honest I can't say that the range bug ever really bothered me much - once you adapt to the fact that your hitbox is actually smaller than what's on display you tend to just attack from that much closer.

That said, I did some research into changing the catform skin recently, and once I established that it's in no way against the ToS and that Blizzard has never, and will never, take any action against individuals that choose to do so, I followed the gravy train and switched my kitty into a cute lil' Tigole. I was surprised to find that it really does make a noticeable difference and I'd recommend that any even semi-serious feral pvp'er do the same.

 

Vykromond

Erm, it is against the ToS. I don't know about them taking action against people for switching their own model- I've certainly never heard of such a case, although you're definitely treading close to Overrated waters- but it has been repeatedly confirmed to be an actionable offense.

A tank, Vykromod.
Will he ever parry them?
Surely he can't block.

 

Lambach

I've been arena'ing as moonkin since the first week with mixed success. For about a month we ran with a very successful set up that kept our rating above 2k.


Moonkin
AP/Pyro mage
Holy Pally
Juice shaman (40/0/21)
AP/frost mage(41/0/20)

The first target to get within range(usually a very stupid warrior) would get decimated. We just all cast once and he pretty much died. If he didnt he got NS chain lightning and all our instant casts. This almost always leveled the field to 4v5. However we had "blown" most of our "load" at this point. So then we switch it up a bit, I cyclone bot, and roots. Shaman focuses on totem rotations and chainlightning while offhealing, and the mages wear people down. I almost always was targetted first. I think most teams are trained to get rid of cyclone first. However, after a few weeks I was sporting 13k armor, 200 resil and 11k hps buffed, and was very hard to take down.

There were only a couple teams that could fuck us up. A rogue heavy team with a druid cycloning our paladin. All the rogue pop COS and we really cant do a whole hell of a lot, just try to survive til its over, or burn down whatever else is up.

The other team that is hard is a spell locking team. Good versions of these are rare to come by, but they would destory us. Usually they have a silencing shot, with a mage and two fricking felpups. With all ranged dps it was really hard to burn down that first guy quick enough, and then we were pretty fucked.

At this point I'm pretty sure moonkin is in the same boat as feral for top end arenas. We just dont bring enough useful tricks to the table to warrant us a spot, and our arena sets kinda blow nuts. A moonkin is really fun to play in arena, but I just think the spot is probably better served by another mage.

 

Sheldong

What do you all think of a 5 feral druid arena team?

It would be pretty gimmicky, and would go something along these lines..

open on the squishiest target, 1 pounce->mangle/4 ravage->shreds. It is instantly a 5v4 at that point. I highly doubt in someone's ability to get a BoP up in that amount of time.

Once it's a 5v4, 3 druids pop out and cyclone predetermined targets (2 healers, 1 more dps), while the other 2 kill the only non-cycloned target. Cyclones can be rotated as to avoid diminishing returns. The fact that you can trinket out of cyclone is mostly irrelevant, even if you do, there's still a feral charge -> bash-> cyclone until you can switch with a teammate.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Doing 5 of any melee doesn't work very well. You make yourself way too susceptible to aoe such as psychic scream, blast wave, cone of cold etc.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Bibdy

You'd be surprised how quickly people can get a BOP off when they're expecting 5 stealth classes.

There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.

 

Solstice

I think there's some confusion about this. The ToS states clearly that modifying game files is not allowed. So for example, if I were to go into my common.mpq file, alter some of the models around and use a 3rd party program to start up WoW, yes that would be against the ToS and I would most likely get a ban sooner or later. WoW has an inbuilt program to protect against this, I forget the name but it basically scans your game files when you log in to check if anything has been altered.

However, to change the cat and bear models you don't have to edit any game files. You simply name the models you want to use the same names as the cat/bear files, pack them into an mpq file and pop it into your data folder. In that sense, it's no different from using any other interface enhancing mod. If Blizzard didn't wish to allow this it would be extremely easy for them to remove this functionality.

Besides this, I can recall seeing 2 separate screenshots, one from a GM in-game telling someone in no uncertain terms that it was fine to change model skins so long as it didn't effect how other players view them, and another in the form of an email from Blizzard technical support stating exactly the same thing.

I agree that it IS a gray area, what they want to be sure to prevent is anything that could be viewed as cheating, for example changing herb nodes or pvp targets to bright red arrows. So long as you don't cross this line I'm convinced that they're perfectly ok with it. If you have some official information stating otherwise I'd be interested to see it, preferably before I get banned ;p

 

Azoth

It's my understanding that blizzard disabled overriding mpq files by simply putting them in the correct directory within your wow install. To change models I think the game's actual mpq files must now be altered. If you are competetive about arena, it's just not worth the risk.

 

seminarca

As a slight digression, Azgaz's latest movie, Nerf Druids 5: Cow Ninja of Doom, has an Arena segment near the end with a bunch of hard fought battles from his 2v2 Arena team (2 ferals! imagine that). It's a good illustration of just how hard Druids have to struggle to scrape by, the limited amount of control we have (Cyclone included), the war of attrition that has to be carefully choreographed and executed vs a dps/healer team etc. Kind of depressing.

link to video:
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=41727

link to official forums post:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...10463317&sid=1

 

• Gwaihir

You don't alter the game's MPQs, you just pack up your renamed files in an MPQ of your own and name it patch-# (Where # is a number not used by a blizzard patch at the moment, usualy three or higher.) But this is the stuff of details and derails, anyhow.

 

nettik

The problem with Feral Druids is well, being feral. I played a feral druid for two years after dumping my paladin (the class I started at release), and what was strangely odd, the spec that was considered more of a PvP then PvE spec turned out to be more of a PvE spec than PvP in Burning Crusade.

5v5
When Arena season first started a group of my guildies and I decided to form a 5v5.

Resto Shaman
Holy Priest
Feral Druid
Shadowpriest
Hunter

Yes, the setup is completly retarded. However for about four weeks we maintained top 10 in our battlegroup until we found things to get too hard. We had to play 10x better than the other team just to beat them. The problem I myself ran into, was the fact to be any effective I was sitting in caster, and not where my talent points were, in feral.

Unless something is changed with cyclone, feral just doesn't cut it for 5v5. Theres no point in not using one of the best spells druids have. And the problem most feral druids will run into, is shapeshifting issues (running out of mana from constantly shapeshifting, you can blame blizzard for either the bad itemization, or shapeshifting costs being to much), or the fact to do any dmg, or be of any use they have to be in a feral form, and thus cannot cast cyclone.

3v3/2v2
My druids 2v2 team, just before I quit him was at 2100, at the time the top 2v2 team was 2200. I'm not going to say much except get a rogue, and learn.

overall
Feral lacks in arena, and is more of a PvE spec now. By the way, the shadowpriest in my 5v5, is now in the #1 5v5 in my battlegroup, the hunter qut. Myself and the priest rerolled to a warrior and paladin, and the shaman is now elemental in our new 5v5.

zomg

Damn I ended thsi really early...

 

Leleth

I see people rerolling to warrior & paladin everywhere. Blizzard should react fast before the dust fades and only plate is left over.

 

valner

Druids are pure ownage in pvp. The problem with druids is they have no cookie cutter approach. They are a jack of all trades and a master of none. This amazing flexibility combined with varied team combat makes them true gods. The problem is many druids simply suck at pvp. To pvp effectivly you need to be a master of all your forms and not a one trick pony. You need to be ready to cyclone, root, nuke, bear stun, cat shred etc. Its like a warrior who never changes his stance.. if you never change forms then your not using all your tricks. When I play druids I am always scared. If they sit in feral or moon or human then I could careless about them. The guys who form shift often are always in the right place at the right time to piss me off and own us. Druids will not make a team (like a good paladin can!) but they bring incredible options to your teams table. Just like in baseball, an amazing utility infielder won't win you a championship but it can be really really helpful!

http://ctprofiles.net/talents.ct?cid=550342

 

Kink

I have been 2v2'ing with a warlock a fair bit.

One gem no one has ever mentioned is maim.

Building up 5 CPs and maiming a target who is totally stacked with DoT basically means he sits there for 6 seconds taking damage and being unable to move. In that time I usually switch to the healer, interrupt. Cyclone, bash, maim when its back up. The DoTs finish off our original target pretty fast and with the healer pressure with fear and my interrupts they all struggle to keep themselves or their partner alive.



Our fights often go...

Fear the healer, pounce-mangle-shred on their DPS.

Refear the healer if he trinkets. Warlock stacks up dots on their DPS.

By now I have 5 CPs and I maim and switch to cyclone their healer.

Then I hit bear form, feral chage to stop the incomming heal, bash the next heal and by now the warlock has lost DR on his fear and there is no trinket left for the healer so he drops his AE fear on them both.

Usually their DPS is dead by now =). Either way we save SkillCoil for if I miss an interrupt or if fear breaks early, or if its 2 DPS and the lock gets focussed at the start. We have found it really effective so far. I can even pop out the odd heal or two if needed.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Vykromond