Feral Megathread - Page 334

Janraea · 10/15/08, 1:02 PM

Originally Posted by kalbear

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.

Maeltne · 10/15/08, 1:56 PM

Originally Posted by Janraea

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).

kalbear · 10/15/08, 2:05 PM

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.

• Caniki · 10/15/08, 2:41 PM

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.

Mijae · 10/15/08, 3:21 PM

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).

Originally Posted by kalbear

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.

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).

kalbear · 10/15/08, 3:38 PM

That's reasonable. I have it proccing closer to 50% due to haste effects on the raid, but I don't have specific data that shows this. I do think that it's entirely dependent on what a bear wants, and from the reports of ease of tanking it doesn't sound like an extra 2k armor is needed anywhere for survivability due to the short lengths of fights and the nerfing of physical damage. Still, having another trinket that is close to being on par with badge is going to be valuable as progression occurs in WotLK and it's another option.

I'm guessing it's going to be incredible for AoE tanking though.

BOHIC · 10/15/08, 4:03 PM

Originally Posted by Mijae

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).

Do you have numbers on which idol wins for Mangle spam? Rawr 2 is still doing Shreds, but even so it has [Idol of Feral Shadows] ahead of [Everbloom Idol]. The next two idols are [Idol of the White Stag] and then [Idol of Terror]. I'm sure Mangle spam will bring the Mangle Idols closer to the Rip one, but does it allow them to surpass it?

Pharmacon · 10/15/08, 4:12 PM

Originally Posted by BOHIC

Do you have numbers on which idol wins for Mangle spam? Rawr 2 is still doing Shreds, but even so it has [Idol of Feral Shadows] ahead of [Everbloom Idol]. The next two idols are [Idol of the White Stag] and then [Idol of Terror]. I'm sure Mangle spam will bring the Mangle Idols closer to the Rip one, but does it allow them to surpass it?

Rawr 2 for cats is not up and going yet though. For instance I can drop talents in Primal Precision and I remain at the same DPS points.

BOHIC · 10/15/08, 4:50 PM

Originally Posted by Pharmacon

Rawr 2 for cats is not up and going yet though. For instance I can drop talents in Primal Precision and I remain at the same DPS points.

Right, I assume it's some issue like that that is undervaluing the Shred idol and expect that it's undervaluing the Mangle idols too, but I'm not sure how to figure out by how much. [Idol of Terror]'s proc mechanics are well known, but I can't find much info on [Idol of the White Stag]. Probably because no one took it seriously as a cat idol before this patch.

Mijae · 10/15/08, 6:22 PM

Originally Posted by BOHIC

Do you have numbers on which idol wins for Mangle spam? Rawr 2 is still doing Shreds, but even so it has [Idol of Feral Shadows] ahead of [Everbloom Idol]. The next two idols are [Idol of the White Stag] and then [Idol of Terror]. I'm sure Mangle spam will bring the Mangle Idols closer to the Rip one, but does it allow them to surpass it?

It looks like I had another circular dependency creep into my spreadsheet for [Idol of Terror], but I can get what it's value would be when no idol is equipped.

In max dps gear the value of idols for Mangle spam by my estimates show

1) [Idol of Terror] (~38 dps)
2) [Idol of the White Stag] (~34 dps)
3) [Idol of Feral Shadows] (~30 dps)
4) [Idol of the Raven Goddess] (~13 dps)

Note this is only for personal dps at 70 and of course depends on other gear. Raven Goddess will be best for raid dps by far, but it's hard to quantify it. Assuming other classes get the same or better DPS from crit rating, it would only take 3 melee in raid to make it best.

kalbear · 10/15/08, 6:28 PM

Note this is only for personal dps at 70 and of course depends on other gear. Raven Goddess will be best for raid dps by far, but it's hard to quantify it. Assuming other classes get the same or better DPS from crit rating, it would only take 3 melee in raid to make it best.

To clarify, it would only take 3 melee or hunters to make it better. And you can now likely count all tanks as at least half a melee for those calculations.

Valerian · 10/15/08, 8:33 PM

On live now, has the nerf to PI gone through? The tooltip hasn't changed but I do seem to recall seeing that it WOULD be going live.

Edit:

Also it appears PvP gear STILL has its extra armor. My Vengeful Gladiator's tunic gives me more armor than my T6 chest now. I can't see how this is intended.

Cyandire · 10/16/08, 12:25 AM

Im suprised there havent been more discussions about a kitty dps rotation, with the changes to Tigers Fury and the new rake and fb numbers. say we're running with 4p t6 sunwell level do you think now its worth keeping 2pt4? And what sort of rotations should we be looking to use including timing of TF?

Beace · 10/16/08, 3:17 AM

I've been giving cat mangle-spam some thought. The point must be to keep rip going, while also using FB reguarly. So we need 5/5 FA, imp Mangle 3/3 and RnT 5/5.

It seems to me, that the only way you can get all these points is in a cat focused talent build (while still at lvl 70 anyway). In a bear focused hybrid build which I'm using, it must still be a lot more effective using the old shred rotation.

Thoughts?

dukes · 10/16/08, 8:06 AM

Originally Posted by Cyandire

Im suprised there havent been more discussions about a kitty dps rotation, with the changes to Tigers Fury and the new rake and fb numbers. say we're running with 4p t6 sunwell level do you think now its worth keeping 2pt4? And what sort of rotations should we be looking to use including timing of TF?

The majority of that discussion has been happening in the http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t26297-d...ew_discussion/ thread.

Mostly it seems to be a set of rules rather than a rotation as such.