I think the level 70 demo roar is still not as good as the warrior one. I took the 5 points and placed them in Primal Precision and King of the Jungle. Could also choose some other mixture of iLotP or Brutal Impact depending on personal preference. I wouldn't recommend skipping Primal Precision due to 10 expertise being a huge chunk in full tank gear.

Why are people taking PI in their bear builds? Is the 10% crit damage buff still present in bear form or does it still affect bear form?

Referring to MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Feral tanking nerf... Actually a buff?

The level 70 demo roar has not been buffed in any way; it is still inferior to the warrior version at 70. Feral Aggression, if taken, should only be taken for the FB buff - and because there is no savage roar at 70 it should just be skipped entirely.

PI does nothing for bears right now. The entire talent is currently only working for cats. It's still unclear whether this is as intended.

Someone in the WotLK thread calculated the following, normalized per talent point for lvl 80 with premade gear, has anyone done the same for lvl 70 T6/SWP gear?

For pure bear 70 build I'm trying to decide between:

Naturalist: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Not Naturalist: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Note: I want, and am required, to get IW

Basically it is Naturalist + 2/3 Feral Instinct VS 3/3 FI, IM, PI + Utility (bash)

From the values above Not Naturalist beats out Naturalist by ~100, which leads me strongly towards 0/61/0.

EDIT: Just noticed:
Any word on this? Without this it appears impossible to get a pure bear threat build from just feral with superior tps than getting Naturalist. This leads me to 0/51/10 as the pure bear build.

Testing confirmed that the entire talent only applies to Cat Form now. I asked GC directly in that thread whether this was intended or an unintentional consequence of changing the AoE damage reduction bit, but he never replied. The pessimist in me would assume it's intended and the silence is simply to not cause a backlash in the face of a nerf.

If you have an high enough raid-buffed attack power and critical strike (5k ap and 50% crit for istance).

Ferocious Bite will do slightly more damage than RIP (without glyph) also without feral aggression.
Considering glyphs and extra energy waste we can go with the following cycle:

- keep mangle up
- keep rake up (look at mangle debuff and save energy)
- shred to build cp and when ooc proc. (look at mangle debuff and save energy)
- RIP at 5 CP or FB if you have less than 35 energy and you don't have the glyph or use FB if RIP still running
- RIP at 5 CP or FB if you have more than 2 seconds of RIP timer still running (more than 2 ticks) and you have less than 40 energy.


RIP:

mangle*(259+0.05*ap)*ticks

at 5k ap = 662 dmg / tick

FB with >50% crit

(1-red)*(817+0.35*ap)*2*1.1*1.03*feral_aggression

at 5k ap, with an armor reduction of 25% = 4363 without FA, 5017 with FA

let we think that we will use FB for less than 40 energy (the 5 extra energy adds [2.1 + AP / 410]*5*crit = 162 damage without FA and 186 with FA.

RIP DPE = 22 x tick
FB DPE = 113 without FA, 130 with FA

This mean that you need:

113/22 = 5.1 tick to make RIP better than FB without FA
130/22 = 6.0 tick to make RIP better than FB with FA

Ah thanks for the information on PI. A bit sad, but it kind of makes sense.
We almost always have a dps warrior or two, so yeah I'm going to drop FA. (I only had 3 points on live). That allows you to take a few more hybrid style talents, but still even full feral is pushing it.
IW makes more sense as we can put it up in cat at no extra dps cost.

Has someone tested what the armour multiplier is at?
Also does the harness of carnal instinct still have it's bonus armour?

Harness of Carnal instinct -does- still have its bonus armor. Haven't been able to stay online long enough to test the armor coefficient.

Just got on after long w8 for 3.0, finding out some of my macros dont work:

I use this one as mangle/lacerate:

/castsequence reset=1.5 Mangle (Bear)(), Lacerate, Lacerate, Lacerate
/startattack

and this one for mangle/swipe:

/castsequence reset=1.5 Mangle (Bear)(), Swipe, Swipe, Swipe
/startattack

Neither work as of right now in 3.0 so just wondering what the new reset is?

Now u guys say u would take IW over king of jungle y? I mean more damage while getting rage would be nice plus on the dps side poping tigerfury every 30 sec to get 60 energy is alot better than IW imo.

I think it's just the brackets, this works for me on beta anyway:

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=1.5 Mangle - Bear, Swipe, Swipe
/startattack

My estimates show the value of Rake at 70 is highly dependent on gear level. With near-full Sunwell gear, Shred actually becomes equal to Rake. If less than 100% uptime, it could even be slightly better. The lower level your gear is, the better Rake is. The margin might be low enough that it's not worth the hassle. This is similar to the argument of using Mangle-spam. Of course, you might as well start getting used to it in a cycle.

I would go for this as a full cat spec Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft and Mangle spam (assuming 2t6).


KotJ is only good for threat in bear, which we expect to have more than enough of. It also comes at the cost of reduced armor during that time. KotJ was never part of a bear-only spec. IW has defensive value. If considering cat, then yes IW is far less valuable. This goes back to the need to split bear and cat specs at 70.


Edit: I think this spec might still work for a balanced hybrid build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft. It's only missing PI and PP for cat and a few points in RnT for bear (could even drop RnT if threat isn't an issue). Berserk isn't really worth sacrificing OoC even in a bear build. The main sacrifice is utility talents.

This is not what my results show. With 5000 AP, 50% crit and 150 APen rating against 7600 armor boss debuffed with FF and EA (25% dr from armor), rake in my example has cca 100 DPE while Shred around 70 DPE (the numbers are valid for my simulation only, i dont have naturalist included and other than armor debuffs on the target, but the relative value is what is important). I see no way how Shred could overcome Rake. The only situation where Shred comes close to Rake in my simulation is when you have almost 100% crit chance. Does someone else have numbers for this?

I also dont understand how Rake uptime affects its value?

I did some simulations using my flash with sunwellgear and level 70 abilities.

Ive got all talents and T6-bonuses but without berserk. Yes i know you cant have Feral aggression, imp. mangle, shredding attack etc in the same spec, but it wont change the numbers. I only use shred on ooc-procs with mangle-spec, so it doesnt matter if it cost 60 or 42 energy. And FB gets 15% from Feral aggression + 15% from T6 for both strategies.

Shred = Only mangle if the mangle-debuff is down.
Mangle = Mangle all the time but use shred on ooc-procs.

Without glyphs
Shred: 1923
Mangle: 1934

With Rip-glyph
Shred: 1990
Mangle: 2004

With Mangle-glyph
Shred: 1930
Mangle: 1910

With Mangle and Rip-glyph
Shred: 2035
Mangle: 1997

With Trauma, Mangle and Rip-glyph
Shred: 2160
Mangle: 1990

Note that this is done over 600 seconds, and its only one fight.

No matter if you have glyphs or not you do about the same dps with both strategies.
If you got a trauma-warrior, Shred is better but not by that much.

I think il go for a manglespam-build for dps during the next month for two reasons.

1. I wont loose that much damage for not using shred.
2. I prefer building fast combopoints since most fights require you to move around.

Yeah, Sunwell got nerfed into pretty much nothingness, it seems. We single tanked Kalecgos and killed Entropius in 2 minutes last night. It's crazy how fast things are dying in there now.

I don't mean to distract from the kitty dps discussion that is going on at the moment, but I have a real quick question about what talents the +10% damage bonus Naturalist benefits. Looking over the thread, although I couldn't find anybody that said it outright, people seemed to be hinting that at it benefitted all bear abilites (white and yellow hits) in addition to cat abilities. I'd just like to confirm that this is indeed the case as I'm in the process of trying to determine which talents I want to take.

In particular, I'm looking to maximize my tps, and I'm trying to decide between some of the deep feral talents (Improved Mangle, Rend/Tear, Berserk) would be better to then going any deeper in resto then I have to. Although I haven't tested it yet, I would think (just my musings here) that deep feral with a much more powerful Maul and a much shorter cd on Mangle would more then make up for the damage loss from not taking naturalist. This seems especially the case for the bosses where I'm tanking (BT/Hyjal) which hit hard enough that I tend to have enough rage that I can spam attacks and use Maul on almost every attack.

I'll try and post some numbers tonight after playing with one of the training dummies for a bit (does Omen record threat against them? My server has been incredibly unstable), but I'd like to know what other people are thinking on this at the moment.

With full Sunwell gear and full buffs, my estimates put us at around 6366 AP, 55.78% crit, 188 ArP rating, 9% hit, 4% exp. Yes on a high armor boss Rake will still be higher DPE than Shred, but on a low armor boss (6200) Shred will be higher. My calc puts both around 92 DPE. For a high armor boss, Shred drops down to about 85.

Hmm.. does bonus damage (from stones) affect Rake? I just noticed I don't include it for anything that doesn't add to base damage. If so, then it does push Rake ahead for anything we can get in BC.

Your DPE numbers are very different than my calcs though. I'm not sure how you got 100 DPE for Rake with lower stats.

Stumbled upon this thanks to Rawr - for bears, one of the best trinkets now is [Living Root of the Wildheart], which has about a 50% uptime on a 15 second 4070 armor buff. At 2k armor, that makes it one of the best trinkets in the game. I need to test it more to see whether it's close to this modeling, but it should be reasonable - and it should make doing things like grinding trivial given that it (like Mongoose) will proc all the time.

Also, in case you haven't tried it - Mongoose has essentially 100% uptime when facing multiple mobs.

Naturalist affects all physical damage that a bear does, white and yellow attacks. It's very good but I couldn't reasonably afford it and take all the talents I wanted in the bear tree.

Unfortunately, the threat game is dead for the time being, in all but the aoe sense (a decent AoE class can still rip a pack off if they're working at it). If you're tanking, spend your talents on mitigation, cause you do plenty of threat.

I feel the same way. LOL Threat. But when I go through the Feral Tree I can pick up all the mitigation and most of the threat talents I want: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The question then becomes where to put those last 10 points? I have have 2 paths:
1)
3 Imp Mangle - threat/debuff
+1 Feral Instinct - AoE threat
2 Brutal Impact - stun/interrupt utility
2 Shredding attacks - cat dps/lol rage
2 Improved Leader of the pack - lol healing

or
2)
5/5 Furor - that rage gain on shift is sexy, I know the energy part is ... useless for tanking
5/5 Naturalist - lol threat

I initially chose (1), but ... I'm leaning heavily back towards (2).

I went with the 61 build. I decided that I could deal without shredding attacks, go for imp mangle, predatory instincts, king of the jungle and imp lotp. I haven't tested it out, but I hope that this will allow me to dps reasonably with 2pt4/4pt6 without having OoC, while retaining the best aspects of bear.

I don't miss furor at all. Rage is just not an issue any more.

I really recommend feral instinct simply because it is a lot of fun to AoE tank as a druid. Swipe does a huge amount of damage, crits all the time, triggers procs and in general melts mobs, and you have survivability galore.

I went with option 1 as well, although instead of 2 points in Bash, I put them in Improved Mark of the Wild. I like the extra buff, it's something that I'll actually use, unlike the shorter bash cooldown.

I tried to post this build before, but I linked it wrong. It looks like a very strong build to keep our hybrid nature, similar to before the patch. Again, it keeps all of the mitigation talents and most of the cat dps ones. Since RnT and Berserk are essentially just more threat now (and threat is not an issue), they can both be dropped for more utility. There are 3 points spare that can be put into more dps (PI/PP), more threat (RnT/PP), or utility (BI/IW/iLotP).

My estimates put this at about 36% uptime on a 3% proc chance (of course, higher on multiple targets). It's good, but not necessarily top (depending on how highly you value survival over mitigation).

However, note that [Ashtongue Talisman of Equilibrium] does now become one of the best 2 cat trinkets when Mangle spamming. Without Rake it would have about 85% uptime, with Rake drops to about 74% (both slightly lower without 2t4).