Finished up testing abilities. Mangle is exactly as stated in the tooltips - 115% weapon damage + 313 in bear form, 230% weapon damage + 680 in cat form.

Finally got a chance to test Savage Defense (thanks Landsoul). At 0/0/0 it absorbs 75% of your current AP. With the full benefit of feral mastery but no Mastery from gear, the talent pane shows a 32% buff to Savage Defense. This works as previously assumed - it increases your shield to 75% * 132% = 99% of AP. It's probably safe to assume that Mastery rating will increase the size of the buff, so each point of AP will provide a larger shield with increased Mastery rating. So Savage Defense will scale with AP, Crit, Hit/Exp (very slightly), Haste, and Mastery.

Does the removal of feral attack power and the use of weapon damage for many of our attacks now imply that use of a slower speed weapon is more beneficial like a paladin? Does the weapon damage and speed somehow get normalized to the base attack speed of the cat and bear forms?

I covered it before here, though it may not have been clear:

In short, the only thing that matters is weapon dps. Speed and weapon damage are normalized based on your form.

Well, we can scrap talking about the previewed talents. They're dumping everything they've done so far and are going to implement 31point trees, which are a fixed choice until you put your final talent in it. No longer will budding ferals be tempted to get Omen of Clarity.

Whilst I can see a lot of points that needed trimming in all three talent trees, I am curious how they'll manage to slot two different classes in a single tree. Additionally, they're trimming the PvE/PvP differences, which currently were largely grounded in cat-talents.

[source]

From the Cataclysm Balance thread:

Is that how it [skull bash] actually works in the beta? I had read that as a tooltip oddity rather than that the ability would actually cause you to charge in the way feral charge does - if the ability actually causes the druid to charge, does that strike anyone else as rather insane for the class that already has arguably the highest mobility of anyone save possibly prot warriors? Druids already have 30% passive move speed, dash on a 2.5-3 minute cooldown, and feral charge every 15/30 seconds; cataclysm is adding Stampeding Roar on top of that. It seems like a 10-second cooldown charge would be kinda silly - even on a shared cooldown with feral charge, 10 seconds is very, very short.

Currently to get it to a ten second cool down you need to spend 22 points in the feral tree, as all the trees are getting redesigned this will change but I wouldn't expect them to miss something that strong.

It is not out the question that Feral Charge gets removed entirely or at least removed for bears. In the wake of Skull Bash the spell interupt component of Bear Charge was removed in the tooltip clearly to prevent multiple interupts but this leads to the scenario - you have two charges, one interupts, one does not. What would be the use of using the non interupt one?

Cats would still need their Stealthed Feral Charge for PvP of course as a Skull Bash opener would not be appropriate for any non casting target. But the extra mobility is an issue that would need some adressing either by sharing cooldowns or removing Charge altogether.

EDIT: The immobilise effect remains for Bear Charge which changes matters - Skull Bash for caster mobs, Feral Charge for normal mobs. This offers at least utility for both abilities to live harmoniously side by side, but would still require some kind of shared cooldown unless Blizzard intends for us to gain extra mobility.

So AP-scaling for Rake and Rip (and presumably FB as well) has increased by 50%* - that makes sense, in that it keeps the relative powers of weapon damage and AP-scaling attacks after the FAP change (which lets you end up with 50% less AP, assuming FAP is still about 1/3rd of total AP raid buffed).


*) Rake scaling - Live: 1% AP (initial) + 18% AP (all ticks) <--> Melthu reformulated: AP/65 = 1.5%, AP/11 x 3 = 27%,
Rip scaling - Live: 30% (5CP, all ticks) <--> Melthu reformulated: AP/13.5 x 6 = 45%

Level 10 abilities plus a link to a very sparse talent calculator on mmo champ.

No surprise with Mangle at level 10(Goodbye claw?). Vengeance is the tanking ability, but no idea what "Feral Druid" is. Right now the Feral tree is so sparse that a Cat can literally grab everything cat/survival related in Feral/Resto and have an unspent point(Shapeshifts are 5% base in beta so the cost reduction isn't necessary). I see this tree still getting more passes before any kind of planning can be done.

Talent Calc : WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie

Ghostcrawler has mentioned that druid talent tree is amoung the least developed:
- While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations.
- There are placeholder talents in various places in the trees though, and we'll keep iterating on all of them throughout beta. This is a pretty big change to every class.
- These are old talents. This is not the paladin revamp that we said was coming. Sorry, you'll just have to wait a little bit longer ... Druids aren't as far along as paladin
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But looking through them I've a few initial thoughts:
New Druid Talent Tree: WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie

(1) Things that have being cut, that I miss
- Extra combo point for Cat crits, I presume it will be added back in, but just to say that I think cat dps would get alot slower and possibly arkward without this.
- Improved Leader of the Pack, losing the 8% health and mana regen is massive loss, especially for pvp with alot of shifting and casting instant nature spells going on.
- Reducing cooldown on faire fire for bears was a nice talent, while not essential it could be good to put back in as an option for people that want to pick it up.
- Primal Tenacity - reduced fear duration and reduced damage taken while stunned, again was very nice to pick up for pvp.

(2) Things I'm happy to presume will happen.
- Survival of the fittest, crit immune. I presume this will be added back in or combined into bear form.
- Furor - only goes to 60% chance, again presuming that this is just a matter of changing the numbers now that talents only go up to 3 points.
- The talents that decreased cost of abilities and swipe damage. I'm assuming that these will either go into the first tier, Ferocity, or be baked into the actual abiliites directly.
- Omen of Clarity becomes a base skill, was mentioned as possible by blizz post, so as its gone from the talent trees I'm presuming this is true.

(3a) Overall Feel - Resto tree side
- Resto tree side feels good, everyone will pick up the 5 points for Blessing of the Grove and Furor, and then pvpers and bears will pick up the 3 in Perserverence. 5-8 Points seems fair to put into resto, wouldn't want it to be more.

(3b) Overall Feel - Feral side
- Personally I like having Predators Swiftness in Tier 1, its a dynamic of pvping/soloing as a cat that I love at 80, and having started lvling up a horde druid I really missed doing it early on.
- There should be more talent options in Tier 1, atm your first 5 poitns are fixed, some of the above suggestions could go here. This goes overall too, not enough places to spend points.
- PvE Cat, You can pick everything related to pve cat with 31 points + 5 in Resto, leaving 5 free to either pick up all the bear form talents or all the pvp talents. Which while nice, makes it feel like we're not really making choices, rather we have exactly 2 choices, Cat+PvP or Cat+Bear. To cover two aspects like that we should have to have 2-3 points missing from both choices, just be a tiny bit worse than those whole want to go fully into 1 aspect. At least thats my view.

- Ghostcrawler mentioned that there would be around 41-42 possible points to spend in each talent tree, and feral has 42. However that works for all talent trees except Feral, for the simple reason we have both Cat and Bear in the one tree. So you must add another maybe 4 to 8 points or so to the tree to make it feel more like the other talent trees.

(4) A Question
- Not certain if this is known, but what is the intended workings of the talent, Primal Madness? Does it instantly give you 20 energy (for both Tigers Fury and Beserk) along with increasing your max energy to 120, or does it only increase your maxium energy to 120?

In general, I think the restructuring and compressing of talents have left the feral tree in a rather clunky state -- and as acknowledged by Blizzard it's certainly a lot more challenging to work than some other specs given the new talent layout. The fact that I can pretty much develop one build for tanking and DPS without missing anything is a fundamental issue. Additionally, as mentioned above given that we are so heavily invested in the feral tree (especially given the changes on the resto side as they pertain to feral) it certainly needs some diversity. In general, the talents that are in there are good but the structure and distribution needs some tweaking (and tweaking they will do obviously, given that this is a first cut -- particularly for feral). However, this notion of taking things you can't fit in there and making them 'baseline' just doesn't sit well.

On a slightly different note, a lot of folks have pointed out that the new vengeance as it pertains to bears may be a bit too much -- however if you think about what they've been saying about threat in general (I.e. less effectiveness of MD/tricks as well as possibly decaying threat) it makes sense. It's definitely balanced more with raid tanking in mind, and is less about say 5-mans but I don't see it as being too out of line. From an itemization standpoint this gives tanks a bit more parity with DPS as they actually gear up, where right now upgrades in your tank gear is not giving you the extra offensive capability such that you can keep up with your DPS a little more (granted it's slightly less of an issue for bears given how we gear up).