Ehh.. I just tried building another "All bear, all the time" build while prioritising survival above all else, and taking threat talents in the optimal order only when the layout of the talent tree prohibited me from taking survial talents.

Dropping every single point into feral makes a scary amount of sense. Naturalist is purely more threat and damage, and at every point you can grab either more survivability, or more tanking utility instead... Doing this also lets you max out feral aggression and infected wounds in the same build without giving up anything but damage, meaning that you are fully selfsufficient when it comes to tanking debuffs.

Not actually--if there is 115 rating on the available gear, then a feral needs 33 more rating yet to get to the dodge cap for expertise with Primal Precision, and is still about 100 rating below the cap without it. The two talent points are worth 66 rating.

In any case, I don't see it being that different than any other cap. If we had 142 hit rating, we swapped out hit gear for stuff with more stats or (later) haste. If we were at the armor cap, we swapped out high armor items for things with higher stamina and agi. This will be the same, I am sure. I'd rather be able to get to the cap and change an item to balance my stats, than to never approach it, as was the case in BC.

Still, might be useful to do a little "alt click for feedback" and suggest that they give us more hit and less expertise in some cases. Edit: while you're alt-clicking, also ask them why the heck our Naxx 10 set, the feral Naxx 10 set which will not be used by other classes, has AP instead of Str, when Str is a 16% better stat per item budget point for both Cat and Bear, and they are otherwise interchangable. Maybe with feedback they will reconsider; it is in beta after all.

Also, don't discount the second portion of Primal Precision: "You are refunded 40/80% of the energy of a finishing move if it fails to land." This is non-trivial until we are both hit and dodge-expertise capped.

I am confident we'll have enough mana to battle rez, IV, and throw the occasional emergency heal or decurse, especially now that powershifting is dead, long live King of the Jungle. For a long time my DPS set was 2pT4 and the rest rogue stuff; no int on my gear was never an issue for me. Edit: that was with Intensity and Natural Shapeshifter, but nonetheless I am not too worried. I always carry a stack of mana potions to be safe. The 20% int portion of HotW does feel a bit vestigial, but eh.

I think we will be fine without INT on our feral-gear. The reasons are:

1. Powershifting will be gone -> In most cases there will be no mana usage while tanking or DPSing (Except inervate, b.rez. or rooting effects.

2. We have our base INT, enchantments that give all 5 stats (at least i think there will be some new) and the raidbuffs (Kings, AI, MotW)

3. If you need more mana in a fight a main Decurser/Healer died and you only have to decurse 1 or 2 persons, place a hot and b.rez., nobody can be expecting extraordinary healing performance in feral-spec /-gear.

4. If there will be an encounter where we have to multirole (DPS+decurse) there still will be the possibility of manapotions and some jewelery/cloaks/castergear/weapons with int.

Edit:

I forgot PVP/Arena: a tiny bit of int on arena gear (not more than 10-15% of item-points) would be nice, since the multi purpose of ferals in 2v2 or 3v3 can make the big difference, but for pve i like my gear "raw".

Well with 115 on available gear and 59 from the new staff (which is a DPS staff by the look of no armor on it) we're already over the DPS cap if we have the talent. That seems fairly wasteful. Now the point about switching out gear and all is good, but we get over capped here with 4 pieces of gear. I can't imagine there'll be another feral DPS staff at that tier so that piece probably won't be replaceable. Similarly I'd imagine we'd be encouraged to use our set gear via decent set bonuses (hopefully not ridiculously OP ones like the current 2T4) which means switching any of these out will also be tough. And this is the FIRST TIER of gear we're seeing. Unless they are going to intentionally keep the expertise on gear so that we're always capped (and increase the other stats instead) its just going to get worse. And if they DO keep the expertise the same we start "losing" stat points due to stacking of other stats higher in the future.

I think having expertise on the set gear is good. Bear needs a good chunk of it (presumably double what cat needs). Remove it from our DPS weapon and it'd probably be ok (replace it with armor penetration or something).

Whether or not we need int, it's clear the int portion of HotW currently makes no sense. It might as well read 'increases your base int'. It should instead provide some mana or better yet, mana regen based on ap or stamina IMO.

And of course, we need to be able to do repeated shifts in pvp, but that's another set of gear they could still change.

I am just curious about the current state of feral dps. I have been reading here and several other websites and cannot see a solid answer, just more posts on tanking and aoe tanking as a bear. My friend that is in beta(survival hunter) tells me that the dps right now is very pathetic and is not like blizzard is saying they want to make it, rogue quality dps. Should I be waiting to see when they tweak dps and abilities, or have we seen the extent of what they want to do to the class. Has anyone that is playing beta now as kitty dps seen an great increase, minimal or no increase on dps in instances such as naxx or the 5 mans? I honestly hope that they enable us to be chosen to goto raids as dps, and not just a mt/ot or healer.

From reading a recent blue post it certainly seems like Blizzard has not addressed Kitty DPS yet. And they are aware of it. One thing to consider is that until a recent build, they haven't "finished" rouges talent trees/skills. I wouldn't expect Kitty to be done until they have a solid rogue. Kind of hard to compare apples to apples if one is still a blossom.

After going around and around on what talent spec I should build, I noticed that I kept falling back into the rut of being a hybrid. This got me to wondering what Blizzard was going to balance for 25 Man Raid MT (Bear) and 'Rogue Level' DPS (kitty) builds. Currently I'm assuming that the tree won't change much, but that individual numbers in talents will. I've come up with what I think those two specs could be and wanted to hear your opinions.

Kitty plus 3 extra points somewhere
Bear plus 1 extra point somewhere

Kitty Needs ( 18 )

• Feral Aggression (5)
• King of the Jungle (3)
• Rend & Tear (5)
• Master Shapershifter (3+2)

Bear Needs ( 20 )

• Thick Hide (3)
• Feral Instinct (3)
• Primal Precision (2)
• Natural Reaction (3)
• Mother Bear (3)
• Infected Wounds (3)
• Improved Mangle (3)

Now, these are not necessarily what I would consider the best specs to currently be, but they are what I think Blizzard is going to balance into 'Rogue Level' DPS (kitty) and 25 Man Raid MT (Bear) specs.

What do you all think?

It does however sink another nail in the coffin of hybrid playstyle. I don't much like the complete lack of intellect either.

Whilst it might make sense in the context of "you are either Cat or Bear" talent trees, not only does adding a minimal amount of intellect cost very little due to stat allocation rules it's also faintly ridiculous to run around in full tier gear with only 5k mana. 10-15 intellect on each tier piece would be much more sensible and would be an almost negligible reduction in the other stats.

Really if you want int, throw one of your sockets at it. Int is absolutely useless in MT roles which would mean our gear would just be lacking compared to the other tanks. You do lose some efficiency, item point wise, socketing for int (depending on what else you would have socketed) but I'd say this is more than made up for in the increased flexibility it adds. Hybrid roles that were dramatically different (physical dps and healing for example) were rarely an efficient choice anyways. I cannot think of any encounter in BC that, as feral I'd needed to backup heal/decurse/depoison that wouldn't have just been better off if I was resto and primarilly healing/decursing/depoisoning.

I agree, as a Feral who has only experienced all of T4, the only time I am asked to heal is Maiden and Prince. But I have a healing kit to wear for those fights, so I have no need for int on my feral gear. Even when I'm kitty, the most I have to do is a single brez and/or innervate that certainly isn't going to cause me to OOM, especially now that powershifting dead.

Edit: Don't forget that we now regen mana faster in feral forms than we currently do in BC. I believe feral form mana regen is the same as caster form mana regen in LK. In BC, feral form mana regen is significantly slower than in caster form. Hmm, I wonder if this means that innervate will not affect mana regen while in feral form?!?!