Ashen

The answer to my question might be more obvious to others, but I'm still leveling my druid up (level 33, aiming to be 70 before WotLK) and I'm trying to figure out what might be faster: The AoE Moonkin method or Feral Druid with Mangle -> Rake -> Mangle -> Ferocious Bite.

I can't really test it myself, but I'm aiming to get to 80 as quickly as possible with my druid. So any feedback on that would be very much appreciated.

 

Frenzi

Personally both druids I have done to 70 I have done as feral and then respeced when I hit 70. I just like having no downtime. My Boomkin which I am rerolling to hasn't really got that good gear yet as I am only about 10 days played so I think I am probably going to level as feral to 80.

My Boomkin: The World of Warcraft Armory

No downtime at all is just too nice to level with, I am not sure how close a boomkin can get to this if they take Dreamstate, Intensity and OoC? I will have a chance to decide better though once the content patch is implemented. What I can say is when I first switched at 70 to boomkin from feral is that it was painful trying to do dailies.


Edit: I have a query about the new IFF, does the crit percentage that has been added only need a faerie fire on the target, I.E. will it still give the crit if Feral Faerie Fire is on the target?

 

Ulthwithian

I'm still leveling my Moonkin (she's 66 currently), and I can tell you that I find it very fun in a 'Warlock Dot-then-watch-them-die' kind of way.

I generally do SF-Roots-IS-(MF if SF didn't crit)-SF-Wrath, and they're dead. (This assumes nearly equal level.) The only issue is that it does have some mana issues, though not as much as you might expect. I'm a bit skittish about AoE grinding, though I'm sure it's viable. It's clearly a lot more viable with Wrath, for both mana reasons and effectiveness of AoE reasons.

 

Erdluf

Reports on PTR are that armor bonus for Moonkin and Dire Bear has dropped to 370% from 400% (change is not on the tooltip though). That is about a 6% drop in armor (5x vs 4.7x), which will result in about 3% more physical damage taken (PvP, AoE grinding).

I believe the loss of bonus armor on gear will be about 2-3 times that large (PvP gear).

 

sadistic

I too am very torn between boom&feral. Being a raidhealer/pvp'er I do have a comparatively much stronger start as boomkin (2200+heal on live, and if I pick up some wyrmkin items for my arenapoints ill get some crit too), while my feral gear is quite atrocious with only 4 epics (kara->bt) and the rest scraggy blues from quests/dungeons.
The ae farming does tempt me a lot, but the constant chaining of kills with feral was quite good when I first pushed up to 70.

At the moment I am leaning towards starting as boomkin, but mostly picking up feral-rewards as I level so I can respec if the ae/caster lvlingspeed doesnt appease me.

 

Kaug

leveling balance is very easy, and every class levels fast 20-60. 60-70 will be much faster to level when 3.0 comes out. IMO it is more about playstyle, as leveling speed is about the same. Do you want to stealth up to mobs and kill them with '0 downtime' or do you want to nuke them from a distance and have to drink occasionally? In the end you're going to kill the about the same number of mobs per min and level at the same rate. On Single-Target vs AOE. I find that single target much easier and faster, right now. With the 2 new AOEs and hurricane losing its cooldown, this may change. I expect that i'll still do mostly single target dpsing and just aoe when i run into spots that invite it. I'm not sure AOE is all that much faster, between setup time, waiting for the few 'AOE-friendly' packs to respawn, hoping another player isn't already farming that spot and rare death\corpse run. Lastly it is about what you want to do long term. How you level will make you learn different skills. You'll be a better moonkin the day you hit 70, or soon 80, if you leveled that way than if you level resto or feral and then swap.

 

erragal

Huge change: Hurricane is now proccing moonkin form mana regen with every critical damage tick on every target on the PTR. Not much more need be said about the implications of this, but certainly our aoe utility is not mana limited at this point.

 

• Adoriele

It's almost like they want us to go from being the spec most laughed at for mana issues to the only spec that never has to worry about mana again. Not sure I agree with this change, except for consistency's sake.

 

Kaug

That kinda leads me to something i have been thinking about. Is there a (Where is the) point where you could build up enough Crit\Int\spirit + raid replenishment in order to have excessive mana regen\return such that you could start dropping mana regen\spell cost reduction talents in favor of dps talents.

What got me started on this path was iMF, a guildie was asking how good i thought it was after patch 3.0. With the MF glyph this talent seems lackluster. On the same tier you have moonglow which is awesome if you are tight on mana, but completely worthless if you end every fight with excess mana. If mana regen is really high after the patch, i'm great on mana now on almost every fight, I might want to move some of those points to iMF or even Genesis. Note i picked these two optional talents because we HAVE to spend 10 to open Tier 3. Similar issues hold true higher up the tree. OoC vs the same 1 pt spent on any balance talent you haven't already taken. If mana is not an issue then OoC is worthless.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I'd probably choose whatever I had better gear for so I'd probably do moonkin if I were you. If you have good gear for both, feral is probably superior, especially with 2pc tier 6.

Mangle and rake hit like trucks now, and you get self heals from crits, a ranged instant cast pulling move that reduces armor, and the big one which is 30% increased movement speed all the time. Downside is you lack any aoe outside of bear form berserk which is powerful but on a timer, and swipe.

 

• Adoriele

Let me put it this way. If you have a Replenishment, JoW, and are a Moonkin, you will not worry about mana.

Ever.

 

Erdluf

Pali's on beta are saying that JoW is now proccing once per four seconds (total for the raid). If that sticks, you may need a few talents spent on mana regen.

Kaug, excess mana is usually very nearly worthless. So if you are never in danger of being oom, you will move that talent point from Lunar Guidance to Genesis (which is almost, but not quite, worthless).

 

• Adoriele

I assume you mean Moonglow =P And yeah, I'm assuming JoW is a bug. If not, it does make for some issues, easily covered by dropping 3 of the 8 points I had left over in Intensity. Then we're back to not really worrying about mana.

 

Trickytrout

Whats the current state of iFF? Worth taking for the 3% crit? Or waste of points if a SP is avail?

 

skeldi

For me, it's impossible to find less useful talents to take out of to put in there. The fact that FF only lasts 45 seconds also makes it difficult to justify putting it up (when other talents wouldn't require me to do that).

I'm of course talking about this from a solo / 5 man perspective.

Your mileage may very with a guild leader that demands it (at least it's not bad now vs useless like it was before)

 

Axanor

You should only be taking IFF if you are in a 10 man guild and are not normally going to have a Shadowpriest available.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

For heroics I think it's worth it since you'll want to cast faerie fire anyway.

In raids where you have a shadow priest I don't think it will be worth it. I haven't seen anyone confirm whether or not the 3% crit works off of feral faerie fire. If it does, I could see grabbing it for a straight 3% crit for 3 points.

 

◊ Pudgeball

Hell yeah - Just tested this out and it's every crit. This is amazing now, I love it. Makes AoE really viable now.

 

Arazan

I disagree with that. With the change to IFF to increase your crit chance against targets affected by FF, it's very useful as a dps talent because you're either A) casting FF, providing your raid 3% hit and armor redux or B) a feral or even a resto druid in the raid can provide FF for the raid and you get a free 3% crit off of it.

Basically I'm saying that whether you're casting FF or not, your target should always have FF on it, so the talent changes to "increases your critical strike chance by 1/2/3%" which is more appealing than a lot of the other talents debated about whether or not it's worth taking (genesis, eclipse, owlkin frenzy, etc).

 

Ranghar

I can't believe it will go live. Nerfs left, right and centre, but mana free, quite powerful AoE without CD is obviously unbalanced. My guess is that chance of regen per crit will be lowered quite a lot in this particular instance.

 

erragal

We have no confirmation that any FF gives you 3% spell critical strike. The problem with testing this is that it requires at least a thousand individual spell casts both with and without to get a reasonable statistical sample for something as random as critical rate. Even the accuracy of that would be in question.

 

Arazan

Well right, but you could say the same thing for any small crit talent. Mage Pyromaniac, warlock Backlash, etc... you can't really design a talent build if you're going to use the assumption that talents are bugged unless we specifically know that they ARE bugged, ya know? I guess my opinion of it is that we just kinda have to assume that the crit portion of the talent works... otherwise talent builds are irrelevant if you can argue that certain procs or percentages are bugged.

 

sadistic

Excuse me if im tardy to the party, but I just noticed that the rank80 version of Hurricane has a 50% AS debuff, vs the 20% from the earlier versions. That coupled with the 0 cooldown change should mean that a vroomkin could be close to mandatory for bleeding edge bosses with lots of adds (morogrim style). If this indeed is not a typo it does seem abit off from Blizzards new stance of class homogenization. I assume ofc that bosses are immune to this effect, due to obvious implications.

 

sadistic

Well, we do have dummies and we do have dedicated people. Im thinking stacking hastegear and/or having the good old mechanical buttonpusher-bot would solve this fairly easily :p (I actually saw a vid of this about 3-4yrs ago.)
Though after pushing buttons on my keyboard 22000 times in SPSS last week, this seems easymode :p

Also, thanks beef for confirming my mindset Zoomkin for starters with feral-gear upgrade-pickups it is. (Unless 3.0 brings farming of hyjal/bt for offspeccs ofc)

 

Erdluf

Take ten friends to an arena floor (STV). With rank-1 hurricane you can do 600 attacks in one minute, and one of them can maintain the unimproved FF debuf.

Help Wanted: Weather researchers.