it's good to analyse things:

The point is not to never run out of mana off course, Mana management is an important part in skillful gaming.

The point of this is to bring an element of melee into the playstyle which causes it to better reflect the class. Some are saying that it shouldn't be useable at all because it's a caster... you mean because it's a mage caster, i wasn't aware that a caster had to fit the typeset of a mage. A druid caster is different, I like the fact that other parts of the class play a role, including the feral school hence the project of broadening the scope of mana on melee from what it is now, to something that makes using your feral forms useful and desirable.

I liked the mana on melee idea when it was introduced because it neatly linked melee in the druid to casting, which became a necessary thing to do once the range dealer had no need for melee any more and vice versa. Rather than have the build ignore it's melee side, I believe it's it's melee and healing other aspects that make it unique, therefore they should play a role. Healing does play a role, I am satisfied with the role it plays, a small one, very useful but only needed once in a while, that's where i'd like melee to be for the druid. Melee for the druid is fun because it involves using other forms, why on earth would you never want that to play a part in the balance druid?

Using it once in a while does not stop it from being a caster, it makes it a different sort of caster. Going to melee is not that daunting at all, although it's not useable in all situations.

Erdulf, I use to suggest this mana on melee have a 10 min cooldown, but as you say, there are limited occasions when it actually makes sense to use it, and it is a bit risky. Although theoretically with the strength of the ability described you could never run out of mana, I think it won't be practical or beneficial to use your cat form ever 15awxa out of 45s in any part of the game, but nonetheless, this is why after some of the points you've raised were pointed out, someone suggested that the cooldown restrictions be dropped, so I used his recommendation.

Ofc for many reasons it won't be practical or desirable to run into melee every 15secs out of 45secs, no matter what Ocyr thinks - he is thinking I want the balance druid to be an elemental shaman, but as usual he is wrong, and if he had been paying attention more closely to the discussion he would not have made that error of judgment, one more in a long line: For me a caster druid, that is too much time meleeing, I wouldn't do it if it meant I won't run out of mana b/c:

1. In PvE, you'd spend too much time outside your aura, and too many situations or times moving back and forth.
2. In PvP, spend that amount of time in a weakened form you'd be trounced.
3. In PvE solo, it's not really ideal to waste time going to cat form that often when you don't need to, much more fun to nuke for as long as you can, burn your innervate, your treants etc, and when all on cooldown, then instead of whack in moonkin form, melee in feral form.
4. I'm a caster, I want to nuke mainly and only desire a little melee because I can change into cool forms, which is why I rolled a druid caster instead of a mage or warlock, but for me 12-15secs of melee every 10 mins is about enough, sometimes i'd need to use it more, but very very rarely. Same with healing, i love the druid caster because it has a melee element and a healing element, or it should have a melee element, this is not quite repaired once melee lost it's usefulness to balance after the buff.

10-15secs every 10 odd ins is how often I'd use it or want to. Now to be useable in a raid setting it would have to have incredible benefits, including compensate you for dps loss, this encourages you to shift because you make up far more mana than you lose, you get to use your special abilities because they cause the buff, and your party gets compensation for losing your aura for 10-15secs by getting some mana reduction.

Again it's something you would only use once in a long mana intensive fight, and not something you would often use. Even better if it was an alternative to intensity. There are risks going forward in melee, even though this a mastereable.

A developer wants you to cast your spells cunningly this is why you have mana, however also being able to employ cunning ways of replenishing it is part of clever play. The balance you want to hit, is to allow the druid more mana generation but not unlimited even if using feral forms is tough, the special buff can easily be controlled with a cooldown slapped on it of 5 mins or 10mins, but that will depend on use. I wouldn't bother if I were a dev, because I only see it being useable once in a while despite the nice buff. If it is being effectively used to some how cheat mana regen at the expense of skill, I won't remove it, it's too useful to remove, not when it opens up the feral school to be useable to this playstyle, I simply put a cooldown on it.

You also forget spell/melee haste rating converison. This raise mana gained per second.
With raid wide totems, battle shout etc. + feral ap staff you gain something like 2000-3000ap. Also wind fury totem give +20% more hits with increased ap(more mana). If someone will tell me what is Moonkin base weapon speed and damage I can tell how much melee dps(not much but over 0dps) moonkin will do and how good/bad mana regen is. Auto attack regen isn't best way to get mana but in some encounters isn't too hard to get couple melee swings. In sunwell you can melee attack demon in Kalecgos, Brutallus(if you are front row), skeletons in Felmyst, Eredar Twins p2 if reverse. I don't know about M'uru or Kil'jaeden.
If fight is so long that mana is problem encounter usually have then multiple different phases. If there is even one phase where dps or survibility isn't so streched then you allways can imagine some way to regen mana in melee range. I don't think that best way to deal moonkin mana problems is some feralish talent. There is way to melee regen in Moonkin form just improve current don't invent another wheel.

In melee range there rarely(never) is any eatable physical damage. Sometime you have to avoid whirl wind but it's more 5-10man mechanic than 25man. Also moonkin have very good survibility(someone use this form to tanking).

You mean, better reflect your vision of how you want the class to be?

Let's try to stick to the topic of discussing the actual and real Druid talents as they exist in the actual and real PTR.

For instance, what are your thoughts on Improved Moonkin Aura and what it means to Druid raid positions (e.g. with that talent alone, it's a given every raid will take 1 Balance Druid at minimum, maybe 2 in the 25-mans). Also, with the apparent resurrection of the Mage Arcane tree, the Balance talent Nature's Fury will also pretty well ensure a Druid in every encounter.

Now, combined with Feral and Restoration all being highly desirable, raids are looking at guaranteeing 4-5 Druids per raid. And probably as many Shaman. Now all of a sudden the most desirable raid composition consists of 2/5 the spots being filled by 1/5 the classes. At this point, looking at that, is there any realistic reason to argue for - or expect - additional buffs to a class that is already guaranteed an outsized portion of raid spots as-is?

Just because some ppl don't like your ideea that doesn't make them stupid, pessimistic or stubborn. I personally think you've gone too far there. We can all see your arguments and i doubt someone replied to this thread without actually reading everything you said. Though i can see your point and we're you're going with all this melee on mana for moonkins (even if i think it will never be implemented or a good ideea) i don't see your logic in this post, calling ppl that don't agree with you parasites that spread negativity.

I really doubt the 40% spell dmg buff for 6 seconds will compensate the loss of dps. I agree with you that the ability you have described would be fun but that's all; I don't see it really usefull in any situation within the current game content. Again I'm not saying it shouldn't be implemented, I'm saying I don't find it usefull as there are other ways to deal with mana.

At the moment druids look very much like the class to have at least 1 of each specc in a raid, 2 of each not being exactly bad either (if you assume 2 caster, 1 melee and 1 hunter group). It will largely depend on how they rework the party/raidwide buffs. If the auras get toned down and made raidwide it would probably prevent moonkins taking over shaman stacking in caster groups.
I would guess of the 3 speccs balance will actually be the hardest to replace, IFF alone will change how people set up their gear.

Ocyr, Balancemoon....

If either of you say anything else to the other, I'm permabanning you.

I think it's cool that Owlkin frenzy AND control of nature are both available, Moonkins should be going for Owlkin Frenzy , but to an extent will still find control of nature useful, it's resto druids that would be going largely for control of nature.

I would still like Control of nature or maybe Gale winds to reduce cyclone cast time. That would be brilliant. Better if Galewinds, as Resto druids are good enough

Also would be nice if Nature's Grace in addition to taking 0.5secs off next spell, removed the global cooldown of the next spell cast, or at least reduced it by 0.5s also. Remember when NG use to give 1sec cast time reduction ?

I still think for balance it was gimped for including healing spells to go down to 0.5secs, however it would finally make up for that if the GCD was removed on that next spell cast in addition to the 0.5s cast time reduction.

I honestly do not understand any of these suggestions, and on the whole all of your suggestions seem to be attempts to incredibly overpower the spec, or totally change the playstyle/focus of it without really understanding the mechanics of the game or the existing abilities/new abilities.


Cyclone is already a 1.4 second cast time spell with the pvp gloves. Wearing a decent amount of haste, you'll be casting it at 1.3 to 1.2 seconds easily. Instant cyclone is a ridiculous concept, that should never be considered in any sort of competitive environment. So having the talent reduce it to 1.0 seconds (The lowest you could reasonably see it go to) would eliminate gear strategy/usefulness. And make NG useless with it. Neither are good design decisions.

PVP balance is getting several huge buffs between thorns damage buff, starfall, owlkin frenzy, and a twenty second aoe knockback. The only buff I could think being reasonable, without testing, would be making force of nature have some form of aoe/CC resistance, but certainly not immunity. Can't tell for sure without playing with things.

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of NG removing the GCD. You're always going to have a .5 second or so time between pressing the button and the server responding (Even with the best of lag you still have to physically release your held down button to trigger something). It also becomes unbalanced in favor of use with instant cast spells, as you get more benefit using it with them, as opposed to a flat cast spell. On a spell that has a cast time of 1.5 seconds or greater, removing the GCD does absolutely nothing. Unless you're wanting NG to interact with wrath better, but you'd never want to use it like that; you'd use it to have a zero time moonfire, insect swarm, lifebloom, rejuv macroed with a wrath, starfire, nourish, regrowth. This change would make NG one of the most powerful (Overpowered to be exact) one point talents in the game, for resto or balance.

The only really useful change to NG would be a short duration haste rating buff (Equivalent to .5 seconds off of starfire), which would also interact nicely with the new improved moonkin aura percentage buff. But not really necessary.


Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy with everything if intensity just switched into T2 of resto. Those extra two points are really the main sticking point I have, and thats the best way to get them.

For your 56/0/9 build, is the balance tree something like this?

I'd drop balance of power first. The mitigation is, at best, minimal(caster mobs are fairly rare in game), and if you're currently hitcapped, your gear alone should keep you above 5% even at 80(assuming you don't upgrade pieces that have hit to pieces that don't).

I'd drop 1 point in resto(to get 3/3 natural shapeshifter), drop balance of power, and drop a point in brambles.

The level 70 build would look like this.

How about this? Grinding in PvP gear (assuming WotLK mobs hit hard), so keep 1 point of BoP. Add Gale Winds, which looks like it will make Typhoon nice (better than Wrath) against as few as two targets, and Hurricane good against three. Not bothering with Shapeshifter at 70. Wait to see actual Thorns numbers before getting a third point in brambles.

The build at 70 is Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I think there are a lot of reasonable variations to this based on preference/playstyle.

In TBC beta, they said that melee-for-mana was an experiement they weren't happy with it.

During Blizzcon, they said that melee-for-mana would be changed in 2.4.

Here we are, in WLK beta, and melee-for-mana still exists.

Um. Just wake up or something?
It only works in Moonkin Form.

I imagine that's why Unity wrote "if they improve it". There was a lot of discussion on the last few pages about if and how mana for melee should be implemented in feral forms as well (provided you have the moonkin form talent).

It should be removed. Are you not thinking of the complications arising from the 30% ranged threat buffer which gets destoryed when you go into melee a boss? Not to mention that the swing timer is reset upon casting any spell, and the tremendous loss of dps involved in traveling 20+ yds to go melee.

Instant spells don't reset swingtimer.

For shaman, yes.

They reset the timer for druids.

This thread has slowly become catnip for retards.

STOP POSTING IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

From the Beta patch notes, interesting changes bolded:
With all of these changes affecting mana, I doubt we'll have any problems in the future. Just the MK change alone is worth a ton, and OoC proccing off of spells is something we've asked for for a while. The Nature's Grace change significantly increases Wrath's viability, such that Eclipse may be an interesting talent choice. In all, we're definitely to the point where we're going to have multiple choices in how to spec even for just raiding, not to mention the differences for PvP.

One thing notably lacking, however, is extending MK Aura to the raid. Paladin auras, Totems, and even Blood Pact are getting this treatment. I'm wondering if this is just an oversight or intentional.

Didnt we have those notes as fake already in some earlier 2.x.x PTR? I seem to remember the NG affecting wrath and crits regen % mana as incredibly silly. Was at the same time as the questionable 50% of the ap in bearform gets added as +heal to you "leaked".

With current values you could reach 50% crit easily, leading to endless wrath spam beating destro locks at the time.

OoC seems like a decent change though, always wondered why druids dont get a similar mechanic as most passive clearcasting procs.

The wording of the NG proc change and the error in the ToL snare plus adding the remove curse change twice (once with the wrong name) got written fake or at least wishlist edited all over for me, but i guess we will see.

The long awaited change to the moonkin form mana regeneration is a boon to the mana shortage we will be facing in WotLK. While i believe that we still will be facing mana problems, it offers a scaleable effect, and adresses an often critizied mechanic. Of course the proc rate will in the end determine the usefulness, but still, this change is appreciated.

Those earlier patch notes were not fake. You're thinking of >this< set of patch notes. Just under half of those notes ultimately went live in some form. How do I know this? Because I bet 500 gold that over half would go live and lost by 1-2 changes. These notes are also not fake, or else multiple completely unconnected sources are in collusion with one another. These are the actual, current beta notes.

This is all confirmed information via beta patchnotes from Blizzard. Obviously, things are still subject to change, but none of what you're reading right now is fake.