Yeah, we spent the first few minutes of the match attacking the Feral to drain his mana shifting out of Hamstrings and then put Warrior on Priest while I took the Feral to the other side of the arena and toyed with him, occasionally CCing the Feral and going back to heal my Warrior. If he trinketed a CC to try to stop me from healing my Warrior, I either trinketed it or just interrupted and re-CCed.

I've been doing 2v2 with a BM hunter since season4. We've been drifting between 1550 and 1590 rating for the past few weeks now, and just got our season4 bracers this week. We're having fun even though our ratings aren't great, but getting that season4 chestpiece for pve would be awesome... I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this combination or just random advice?

We currently do well against most double dps teams. We'll both burst on one of the targets, and I'll switch to cc'ing and healing leaving my partner and my bleeds to finish one target off. We do somewhat ok against healer+dps teams too if at least one of them is squishy, though my hunter partner has big issues with people using line of sight to negate her damage entirely. The absolutely worst combo for us yet is holy paladin+warrior. We do much better against druid+warrior teams, with a good chance of killing careless druids who leave themselves open for an intimidation in squishy form. With no blessing of freedom, I can also crowdcontrol the warrior much more effectively.

The warriors in paladin+warrior will almost always go for my hunter partner, who'll be unable to provide any meaningful dps with them constantly in melee. That leaves me free to cc the paladin, but it doesn't help with not enough damage on the warrior. If I dps the warrior myself, we don't have any meaningful cc on the paladin, and their plate armor makes it hard to burst either down very quickly. Going for the paladin doesn't usually work very well either, since he can effectively reset the fight with bubble. All the time we'd be dpsing the paladin, there'll also be a freedomed warrior mortal striking my hunter, so I'll need to spend a lot of time cc'ing and healing. At the same time the paladin can just line of sight most of the hunters damage, and I won't be there to provide interrupts for his heals.

Do you think it's worth going for the pvp items in neck,ring, trinket and back slots? I'm currently using pve gear for them, and I'd lose crit, ap, hit, armor penetration, dodge and +healing for a small increase in stamina and resilience. I've also found the scryer version of the Shattered Sun neck very good for extra burst damage. I considered buying the badge pvp cloak to replace my Drape of the Dark Reavers, but I'd hate to lose even more hit. I have 4.57% hit in my pvp gear right now, and those missed pounces and maims just hurt.

What do you guys think is the most optimal gear setup? Currently my plan is to be an engineer and a JC and wear the quad deathblow x44 goggles, rocket boots extreme, 4pc pvp set, t6 belt and bracers, both agi/arp ring, exalted scryer sso necklace, dory's embrace, shadowsong panther, and pvp trinket.


I think the loss of 4pc t6 bonus is worth the edge you get having the extra stealth detection and ability to close distance quicker than normal.

We're similar, but slightly lower rated. Same comp.

Exactly our experience as well.

I find there are no good choices, but the best one is to save your Cyclones for when the warrior has freedom. We usually use them to do an Aimed Shot combo and force the paladin into range. Then I generally try to keep the paladin in LoS for a FC, but there are surprisingly aware paladins playing sub-1600s :P

For hit, my goals:
17 from S3 Helm (+16 from head enchant once I get T6)
21 from S4 Chest
9 from S3 Gloves
17 from S4 Legs

Total: 64(80)

Very doable with the ratings you and I have.
I'll be using my PvE rings and Shard of Contempt.
I plan to get the PvP neck and potentially Dory's Embrace a long way down the road.

That will put me over 250 resil and, considering how often I'm focused, that will be fine.

I tried Warrior / Feral Druid / Disc Priest near the end of S3. The charter was already at around 2k, and we normally played as a double healer or RWD with the druid normally playing resto. Gear was not really a factor, all of us had full vengeful sets and knew how to play. The comp in itself was fun to play, and certainly had a certain amount of surprise in it when the typical opponent expected a boomkin or double healer.

One thing that I found extremely interesting was typically around 30-40% of our losses were due to the feral druid being gibbed first, even against melee based teams. Now, I know that PvP feral gear is nothing like PvE, but I would never have imagined him to be the weakest link. Generally, if they kept the priest CC'd for a brief period of time and slowly burned the druid down, forcing him to make a cyclone for his own survivalbility, they would be able to pull off a clutch fear and get a KB off. Our druid is extremely well skilled, at resto at least, and we certainly didn't know how to run the comp.

The way it seems to play though, is as a cripple team. The druid swaps often between forms, pulling off roots and cyclones as much as possible while harassing healers with DPS while the priest gets a couple mana burns off. The comp in itself has very little burst (it seemed to at least, maybe the druid didn't play feral well), and relied mainly on wearing the other team out or pulling off a CC at a good moment.

Anyone else ran this comp before?

My Feral/ShS Rogue team hit about 1680 max this season, then had a string of dumb losses. We pretty much play "burst down the squishy from stealth", and I don't think any of our matches have every lasted longer than 5 min. Our biggest problem is Paladin/Warrior - we can't burn down a warrior, even with wound poison up, and we can't burn a pally with a warrior beating on us.

The only strat we've found that kinda/sorta works is sap the war, open on the pally, and try to force him to bubble without spending our CP's. As soon as he bubbles, we try to keep enough CC on the war to get a few heals, then burst down the pally with the saved CP's.

We're about to try some Feral/Rogue/Hunter 3v3 and see how we do. So far it's just an alt "play 10 for points" team, but I think we might can make some progress. 3v3 doesn't feel nearly as competitive as 2v2 in the lower brackets (this is the Rampage BG), and using our burst dps to trade our hunter for whoever we focus tends to leave us with a good rogue/feral vs whatever is left on the other team, and isn't too hard to finish off.

Your strategy as a feral druid in 2v2 arena matches generally goes something like this:

First, your partner is going to be some sort of dps. You don't have mortal strike, and you don't have the burst dps to take down a geared healer by yourself. Paladins are pretty easy to control with Pounce/Bash/Feral Charge/Maim/War Stomp/Cyclone, but... well, if you've ever tried to take down a resto shaman as a feral druid, you know what I'm talking about. It's possible, sure, but you need to be perfect with your interrupts and get lucky with some big crits. Anyways...

Buff yourself, discuss buffing your partner. With certain combos, it might be beneficial to hold off on the buffs so that your opponents aren't immediately aware that they're facing a druid.

Once the doors open, either have your partner dodge behind a pillar and wait, or sit and wait in your starting area so that they don't see LotP on them. If there's a possibility of your opponent being a human rogue (ie: there's an opponent you don't see, and the one you do see doesn't have druid buffs), get back within distance of your partner.... or, at least, within charge distance if your partner is a warrior. You don't want to open yourself to being caught by Perception while too far away from your partner for him to help. If your partner is a paladin, have him drop consecration and go stand on it. If your partner is a hunter, have him drop a flare and go stand on it.

Versus another stealther, you play the waiting game. If you open first and the other stealther is a druid, you're likely to be chain slept/cycloned while your partner dies. If you open first and the other stealther is a rogue, you're going to be focus fired, and will (most likely) be below 50% health by the time his cheap shot-kidney shot combo is done. After that, he still has his vanish-cs/ks, prep-vanish-cs/ks. You need to get into bear form asap. You basically have two choices. One: save your trinket for that eventual blind, and let him beat on you through his first two stuns while spamming your bear button. Two: wait out the cheap shot, trinket out of the kidney shot and immediately go bear and equip your tanking staff. Either way, enable barkskin (yes, you can use it while you're stunned) and wait for your opportunity. If his partner is a healer, you're going to try to cc the rogue, toss on your healing weapon (you DO have a healing weapon, right?) and drop yourself some hots. Otherwise, his buddy is going to hop on you and so you stay bear, hoping that you can outlast one of them while your partner (who is most likely sitting there blinded by now, hopefully he saved his trinket for this) tries his hardest to kill one of them before they kill you. Demoralizing shout, frenzied regen, nature's grasp. Feral charge the furthest and run like hell. Don't get caught out of bear form. Most likely, the rogue is just going to shadow step behind you from what seems like half the damn map away and just cs/ks you again. If you're already at 50% or less health without barkskin and not in bear, you're dead. You're most likely dead anyways, unless your partner can either prevent you from taking damage (blessing of protection) or cc your opponent(s).

Versus a Warrior+Healer team, I've found that the most effective strategy is to (generally) cc the warrior while your partner beats on the healer. Once the healer has blown his load (pally - bubble, shaman/druid - nature's swiftness) I like to cyclone the warrior one last time, drop nature's grasp on myself and go help dps the healer. Try to get a 4 or 5 point rip off on him, cc the warrior again if the healer isn't low, think about cc'ing the healer if your partner has fallen behind (gotten spamstringed by the warrior, etc.) and won't be able to help you dps the healer. It's usually pretty easy to judge how fast a healer's health is falling... if you're getting big chunks of it, you can most likely kill him by yourself. If not, you're going to need your partner. Either way, you need to keep the pressure on. With a frost mage, you can generally trust him to kill the healer by himself while you're cc'ing the warrior. With other classes you might want to think about alternating cc on the warrior and dps on the healer.

Versus mage+rogue team. Your success against this team is predicated upon two things. First, the ability of your partner to basically solo the mage, because there's no way you're coming out of stealth until the rogue jumps on your partner. Secondly, your ability to not let the rogue get his opening move off on you. If the rogue is human, you're fucked. If the rogue is running around in more stealth detect/+stealth gear than you are and he gets the jump on you, you're fucked. Set the mage as your focus, make sure you have a macro to feral charge your focus, and wait. Once the rogue opens, you pounce him and start your mangle-shred combo. If you can, try to drop a four or five point rip on him. This is easily the best way to get past his cheat death ability. It'll only soak the first one or two ticks of your rip if you put it on him when he's low. If you see the mage start to cast frostbolt, go bear and feral charge immediately. Stopping (or at least minimizing) that shatter combo is always more important than hurting the rogue. After the feral charge, think about cycloning the rogue before he pops evasion+cos. If you ever find yourself against a frost mage 1v1, it's fairly cut and dry. Los him around a pillar and until you've either killed his elemental or waited for it to despawn. The only way he's going to kill you is with a shatter combo, and the only way he's getting a shatter combo off on you is with his pet's frost nova. Once his pet is gone, you can just chase him around and kill him. Don't use rip. He'll just ice block it off. Save feral charge for interrupts. Close distance by just shifting out of his slows/snares. Consider turning auto attack off so that his ice armor doesn't slow you before you get a bit mangle/shred off on him.

Shadow priests and warlocks are easy kills. They're incredibly squishy... Generally, vs this team you want to kill the shadow priest first. If you go after the warlock, the spriest will heal. Generally, I like to open on the lock. Pounce-mangle-maim-cyclone(or root) then go after the priest. You'll eat through his shield pretty immediately, trinket out of his fear... If you need to, pounce, get to five combo points, maim, wait to fall out of combat (yes, you'll even drop out if you have dots on you... just hope he doesn't get a lucky blackout proc) and then stealth+pounce again. It's not likely that you'll be able to do this if the warlock is still up... but, especially if you have wound poison, mortal strike or aimed shot on him, the priest is pretty much going to fall over. Move onto the warlock. Think about popping out, equipping your healing weapon, decursing his curse of agony and dropping lifeblooms on you and your partner before throwing your dps staff back on and going after him. I usually only do this if I already have a rip ticking on him, unless the warlock is sitting at full health and both my partner and I are sitting at below 50%.

Versus a hunter... Wait out beastial wrath/beast within, barkskin, sleep pet, kill hunter. If he's marksmanship, just rape him. He's pretty much dead already. Survival hunters are a problem... They lay five thousand frost traps and just run in circles over them forever. This sucks. It eats your mana. You can't hit him. He's pelting you. You can only stop them with feral charge and entangling roots. Never let yourself get caught out in the open being the target of a hunter. If you do find yourself in this situation, pop barkskin and go bear, then run for the nearest pillar. Also think about feral charging the hunter and just chasing him around. Can't let him get range on you and destroy you.

I am in a arena team with a hemo/Shs rogue, works quite well we managed to reach the 1600 rating after some practice.
For teams with clothies or shaman /restro druids it came down to us stun locking the healer from the start and bursting him down, rotating maim and kick so he couldn't heal , druids pose a bit of a problem but eventually if we stun him fast enough so he cant go bear form or cast a hot then we normally win the game.
We however could not take a team with a holy paladin in, unless he has a cloth partner but a paladin /rogue or paladin / warrior pretty much killed us after a long enduring battle. Also feral from what i am experiencing at moment is not about cyclone and bashing from the start, I came to the concluding, if speced feral use feral spells meaning stay in cat form try and maim your target for silences and so on. you lose a lot of seconds of good burst damage if you go in and out cycloning with this particular setup and with hemor on the target you boost your burst by a lot. Also we figured that its best that i open up with ravage instead of pounce while my rogue buddy cheap stops him.

Hey,

I not able to create a post yet and this seems to be one of the only threads i see that fight my question.

Me and my friends currently lvling Druid and 2 rogues. Me being the druid currently i'm feral. I probably stay feral for the first bit to do BG's and mess around arena and get my PVP gear for healing then switch to resto build.

Then i started thinking how much damage would the following do

Druid - Pounce, mangle, rake, rip
rogue - garrote, hemo, hemo, rupture
rogue - garrote, Mutilate, rupture

Thats a lot of bleed damage if it's not a pally who can bubble out, or a dwarf there not a lot of ways to remove these effects

After which they could vanish and i'll bear form to tank and interrupt and side heal.

guess question is that much bleed damage viable?

I know probably easier on a priest to just stunlock it with pounce and 2 cheapshots and allow the mutilate rogue to drop him fast. Also with a pally i figured we just force him to bubble then get rogues to vanish then start the bleed cycles on him. while i ran around in bear form.

Once the doors open, either have your partner dodge behind a pillar and wait, or sit and wait in your starting area so that they don't see LotP on them.

No, just rightclick to remove the buff or have it in a macro for arena like I do..(Stealth + Natures grasp + remove lotp)..the first time you shift it will be reapplied

This may be immediately apparent to everyone here, but I'm going to ask anyway.

I'm just starting out with semi-serious PvP on my druid, and I'm staying feral. Having focused largely on PVE before this, my gear is largely PVE and mostly tanking oriented.

My question is this: Is my best course of action to fully enchant/gem a set of blue vendor PvP gear and work from there, or start with my current PvP kit, which is largely PVE gear, which has higher armour, but about 90 total resilience (and a large number of def/stam enchants/gems).

My first 27,000 honour has to go towards a weapon, because my Earthwarden is the best I've got, currently.

I'm really more concerned about personally playing better than about gearing up, but choosing the gear route to appropriately attain my goal will hopefully increase the curve.

I've been doing quite alot of arena lately and must say I think this macro has proved extremely helpful. In the very few games we've come across another feral, the LotP aura is a dead give away and our usual tactic is to just nuke the feral hard. Against another feral, the winner is often the one that manages to get the opener on the other, so hiding our biggest give away could give you the win.


On a different note, we've had a lot of discussion about 2v2, but are there many out there doing 3v3 with much success? I'm currently on the look out for a rogue to play in 3s with my mage. I'm not entirely sure how effective a feral/mage/rogue team could be though. Other combinations I've seen mentioned are:

feral/rogue/disc priest
feral/war/resto druid
feral/rogue/rogue - not too sure on this one

Hunter / Disc / Feral is another viable (if difficult) combo.
Pala / War / Feral works, possibly better than the resto.

Holy Pal / Mutilate Rogue / Feral - probably the smoothest, most straightforward arena lineup I ever played.

We hit a wall back in S2 in the 1800s vs. double warlock teams. That was before drains were affected by healing debuffs, and while the feral arena set was still poorly itemized.

Should be much stronger now. You will want a fairly aggressive Paladin healer who can assist on a burn-down, possibly with Ret as a sub-spec.

How does one remove the LotP buff you all mention? I tried several ways and I couldn't remove it (as selfbuff or buff from another feral). Just curious, since the posts about removing it are month old and I don't remember any hotfix/patch note that mentioned anything alike.

Was it possible to this at that time? (August 18)
Currently on live, you can't right click to remove LotP.

O.o
You can most definitely right-click off the LotP buff - just tested it to make sure it wasn't my memory playing tricks on me.

[e] The *druid* has to click it off. Your partner can't.
[e2] That came out a bit too harsh - edited to appear less of a bastard.

If you wish to use it in a macro:

/cancelaura Leader of the Pack

Anyone know if the damage buff to mangle and rake made it to the PTR patch (which is scheduled to go live this Tuesday)?

EDIT- Answered my own question: yes they did!

Has anyone noticed that currently there is no 2h designed for Feral PVP in WOTLK? It's quite disconcerting.

Also, I'm thinking of running a 2s team next season with a ret pally. With the changes to maim now having a chance to break on damage, rather than just breaking on any damage, and the new kitty charge, and infected wounds. I don't think pallies will have a problem staying on the target (their biggest problem right now is how kiteable they are).

Furthermore, when did Nuturing Instincts get a buff? I used to remember it being 50%, but now it's 70%? That's nice actually. Here's my gear plan as it stands [obviously my goal will to get as much Deadly Glad gear as possible, so let's focus on the stats of the gear]:

Each item basically has 5 things:
Stam
Agi
Crit Rating
AP
Res
Hit Rating

Now at first I was like, where's my INT, but I've been playing in BG's the last few days with zero int on my gear and have done quite well, thanks to improved LOTP.

So here's my take on this:

My goal here is going to be stack as much crit rating and AGI as I can after getting enough res/stam to have a good survival time. With the Nurturing Instincts now giving 70%, that should help quite a bit. Crit rating however, may be more important than AGI after a certain point. My goal is to use to Healing Touch glyph for arenas. This will reduce the cast time to 1sec, but at about the mana cost of regrowth, and only half the actual heal. So, the higher that can crit, and the more healing I have, the more healing that's going to come out of it. However, in the end, the one second cast is by far the reason I'm using it.

I realize it's not "mana effecient", but for a double DPS team, it shouldn't have to be.

For this particular team, I'm thinking this will be my opener:
Pounce, Rake, Savage Roar, Tiger's Fury, Berserk, Burn with whatever it takes
If by chance my target is still standing, I'll probably come out to cycle/heal/whatever if I can. However, that opener plus a ret pallies 10 seconds of burst, it would be hard for me to think our target would still be standing.

What I love about the druid changes is Furor now allows me to gain energy while casting, so coming back to 100 energy instead of 40 is fantastic.

Disadvantages I see:
No MS - Not really concerned because bliz has said they plan to take another look at healing debuffs.
Prone to casters? - This is debatable, with pure melee DPS, pally has bubble and can BoP me. However, casters are much easier to burst down in most cases.
Resto Druids - Should be able to stay close to these now with loss of feral charge and pally JoJ.

Advantages I see:
Huge Burst Potential
Not easily kiteable
With power shifting and BoF, not easy to root
Not easy to fear - <3 berserk
Dual Hybrid leaves options for healing if needed

Anyone else have any thoughts about the upcoming season?

[Deadly Gladiator's Staff] - My guess is this is the feral staff (due to tag: druid, speed vs damage and rest of stats. It's just not showing the FAP).

NI was nerfed, it used to be 50/100, now it's 35/70.

My thoughts on Retadins are rather biased, due to the last weeks. They've been nerfed quite severely and I'm not entirely sure where they stand.

My line of thinking was going towards a combo with a Death Knight more, possibly with a Priest. I'm not sure how this'll pan out. Either one will need massive burst, or the lack of a Mortal Strike debuff will likely rear its ugly head again.

I'm not overly worried about the costs on shifting, iLotP will help some and Blizzard promised a deep feral talent to make Bear/Cat form shifting cheaper. I am more worried about the lack of being able to do anything else, due to the scaling of spell cost.

Ret/Feral could definitely work. But then again so could Ret with almost any class. I can imagine the weakness being mages. Especially double mage teams could essentially kite the two of you forever. Against a War/Healer team, the lack of MS means that if you don't manage to burst one them down in a CC chain, it's likely one of you will run out of mana and lose.

On the plus side, I could see you destroying any double melee team. And the only spec of warlock that ferals have any trouble with (metamorphosis) will essentially be neutralized.


I plan to carry on playing with my mage partner come Season 5. We managed to get over 1700 at the end of Season 4, finding great success as a hard counter to the ever popular rogue/mage combo. And from what I've gathered, mages will be the bane of DKs and Ret Palas at 80 too.

They are talking about having feral dps base off weapon damage instead of giving raw AP. I wonder if they'lll implement that before next season.

We'll see how they are spec'ing. I could see frost mages giving us some trouble, but I also see a lot of mages in arcane at the moment. Guess we'll have to see what happens.