This Spell has been in the database since vanilla i think - it was never actually implemented though.

But even if it would - there is really nothing we could do with even more rage. I can barely use up half my rage these days and we are getting even more of it in LK (rage through dodge as well as more damage overall) - without any new ways of spending more.

I would really like a new usable defensive ability to spend all my excess rage on - and it would 'freshen up' feral tanking a bit.

I have to agree I do feel a bit concerned about feral overall. It feels like in many areas developers are trying to find ways to keep us up to par in spite of the huge changes to the game, whereas other classes are being buffed through these changes.

For example, several issues come to mind from the changing mindset about shared drops. Feral is a unique spec that has had unique "optimal" gear. Now they no longer want to make leather gear that is good for ferals but not for rogues, or offsets that are good for ferals but not for plate tanks. This means the developers have to find ways to make this gear attractive and scale well for ferals. I just see so many problems with this in practice. Right now all tanks get out of the shared leather is the agility (not our best avoidance stat anymore), the stamina, and to a certain point the expertise. As many have suggested, making another stat on this gear count toward mitigation, like AP, seems simply mandatory. But even if this happens, rogues will inevitably want the pieces with the lowest stam, and plenty of crit, haste, hit, and expertise. These 4 stats are useless for feral mitigation - a decent amount of them will be desirable to keep threat up to par, but as long as you are out-threating your DPS any more is wasted. Thus, the drops aren't that "shared" at all. Rogues still want certain leather pieces, ferals want different leather pieces. The itemization of the feral tank gear is thus sacrificed, with band-aid talents or mechanic changes to try and catch it up, all for the sake of a goal (shared loot) that probably won't even be achieved.

My 2nd issue with the gear changes deals more with pvp, and our "hybrid" nature. The change to spell power means that caster dps and healers can share a bit more gear, or at least the stats on them. Some healers will want gear with more regen, while dps will want gear with more crit and hit, but the spell power amounts are the same. This means that in WOTLK, hybrid caster specs will be more truly hybrid than ever. Healers will have amazing spell damage, lacking as always the talents which scale their abilities or add new ones, but having more powerful base spells than ever. Caster dps hybrids will have far better healing than ever, lacking again efficiency and tricks, but gaining a significant amount of pure healing throughput.

In contrast, the higher the level cap goes, the less hybrid the feral becomes. Healers will be balanced around now having 51 point talents accessible to them, and massive amounts of spell power. Ferals will still have 0 spell power (and 0 intellect atm but I'm still praying that's a temporary oversight....) and none of the healing talents. For resto healing to be balanced, feral heals will become completely insignificant.

We've typically been "balanced" (har har) in pvp in the past by the fact that we "technically" can heal and CC a limited amount. I of course don't need to preach to the choir here on the problems with that... but the fact is if the casting side of our hybrid class becomes even more impractical and ineffective, we have nothing but our feral abilities and talents to be balanced around, and if you look at a feral that is limited to sitting in cat and bear, we are a loooooooooong way off from being up to par in pvp with rogues and warriors. With each expansion, they have 3 talent trees filling up with more tricks and scaling, and new trainable abilities directly relevant to the one form they have. We have one talent tree, crammed now with abilities that are "supposed" to make us be able to tank, dps, or pvp, depending on what we choose. We have absolutely no survival vs. casters, or even vs. CC now, our dodge is being slaughtered, our armor as well, our snare is dispellable, we have no healing debuff. We choose between dealing damage "on par" with a rogue but without any of the utility or suvivability, or soaking damage.

I apologize for the long derail as this is not intended as a whine post. My point is that there are simply fundamental issues with what a feral druid is, that do not fit well with the direction of the expansion:

We have 3 roles squeezed into one talent tree,
We must somehow share gear with two completely different classes/roles (rogues/tanks)
We are a physical dps "hybrid" in an expansion where caster hybrids are receiving enormous boosts

I write this because I echo the fear expessed above about WOTLK feral gameplay being pretty similar overall to BC. The buffs we've received, the changes to our tree, don't seem to be heading us in the direction required to overcome the problems above. Developers promise they're not finished, that there will be more cat/bear split, that damage will be brought up to par. But all of this sounds like their only intention right now is to "fix" us, to undo some of the damage done by the changes in this expansion through tweaking numbers and talent points. I really feel that right now we need to be making it clear that that isn't going cut it for the life of the expansion, and do our best to suggest changes that really make us a fun spec to play, and viable in all roles. I don't think any of us should be willing to settle again for a situation like BC - "great tank, subpar dps, bottom of the barrel high-end arenas". If all WOTLK does is move us from 1.5/3 to 2/3, the developers, and the feedback of the feral community, have failed.

Yes Valerian, the original post was done before Natural Reaction/Mother Bear were put in. As far as I can see, Natural Reaction makes up for most of the dodge we would lose while raid buffed because of the nerf for conversion, which makes the loss of Sunwell Radiance a MAJOR buff.

Shamgarr: Without knowing the final status of any tree, especially our own, we can't judge as to what will happen. Blizzard posters have said time and time again that this is NOT the final situation, the talents are NOT final and the dps numbers do NEED to be tweaked. From some of the feedback coming out of Beta, it looks like there's a lot of tweaking to do, but at least Blizzard haven't set a date and are going to push the expansion out at that date, whether it's finished or not.

Edit: On closer inspection, my dodge has increased by more than just Natural Reaction, as all the armour on T6 seems to have been dumped into more agility, see attachment for both T6 new stats (the gems are just what I have in those that show) and the T6.5 new stats (it would seem they missed the T6.5 chest).

T6:
Helm: +8 Agility
Shoulders: +4 Agility, +5 Stam
Chest: +11 Agility
Bracers: +1 Strength
Gloves: +14 Stam
Belt: +1 Strength
Legs: +11 Agility
Boots: +7 Expertise Rating

T6.5:
Helm: +8 Crit Strike Rating
Shoulders: +4 Strength
Chest: +10 Agility (and still has bonus armour, I'd assume this is an error)
Gloves: +8 Strength
Legs: +12 Strength

It looks like the T6 certainly gains a lot more than the T6.5 at least (strength and crit rating, woo). The original 5 pieces of T6 are actually looking quite nice, while the new pieces are all gaining virtually nothing of note.

Not to pile on too many TLDRs in one day but one of a few concrete things that I think are worth talking with developers about:

Naturalist and Omen of Clarity

I really hope that this expansion sees the death of the current omen of clarity setup. Developers seem to be heading in a positive direction with many classes and specs as far as eliminating and moving "mandatory" talents, reducing the "filler" aspect and offering fun options on all tiers, etc. I think they just need a little extra push when it comes to ferals.

Right now there are 11 points in Resto that are near-mandatory for all specs. This is just silly design for any class, but it absolutely cripples the feral more than any other, because it leaves us only 59 points to devote to a completely unique spec with 2 PVE roles, and long-held desires for PvP viability. For Resto, the first 10 points in their own tree are practically filler for PVE. For balance, the first 5 are decent now but still not as good point-for-point as some pure balance talents. For feral, the resto tree now holds 5 filler points for PVE, then 6 completely mandatory points for nearly all roles. That 11th point in resto offers a larger boost than almost all of our feral points.

I think there are a couple possible changes that would go a long way for ferals, and leave developers much more room to do what they want with us. One option is the Relentless Strikes approach. Turn omen of clarity into a 3-point first-tier talent (5 if absolutely necessary), with the proc chance increasing each point. Whether this belongs in feral or resto depends on many factors. For this to work it might have to be collapsed into another talent (furor would be the obvious feral preference... but that makes for a very awkward talent). Another option is make feral aggression a 2-point talent. 5 talent points for a bear build to pick up the max level of AP reduction is pretty absurd... Warriors only take the talent because there is little else useful to get (which is another issue), not because it's actually worth 5 points to them either. And point for point the effect on cat dps is fairly laughable as well. It's a talent that is already in need of trimming, and it would allow some breathing room for a 3-point OOC on first tier feral.

Regardless of what tree it is in, if that can be done... then here's the big one. Get rid of Naturalist. Wipe the stupid talent off the face of the earth and let us all pretend it never existed. Balance feral damage around the lack of it. 5 mandatory talents for feral that never belonged in the resto tree to begin with. Even moving them to feral solves little - Blizzard has explicitly stated they don't like having too many mandatory talents. And feral, possibly more than any other spec, needs to eliminate as many mandatory talents as it can, to leave room for truly defining cat, bear, or pvp roles.

If these changes were made it would essentially free up 8 talent points for pve. I'll admit I'm looking at this from the perspective of already having given up on fitting master shapeshifter into feral builds... if they want us to take this talent and any new ones they add, the whole structure needs to be trimmed and possibly made even more accessible. If these are taken, this whole suggested change only frees up 3 points, but I just can't see the viability of OOC being a 1-point first tier... it's simply way over "talent budget" as is.

If they're going to further diversify cat and bear, while allowing any level of personal choice and "flavor", we need these 8 free points if not more. I'm of the opinion that feral still needs some entirely new talents to truly add anything much to our pve playstyle, and definitely to make us viable in pvp. But right now we're so strapped for points because of those damned 11 in resto that developers have tied their own hands in this regard.

Whether it is implemented in exactly this way or not, I simply hope that people on beta forums keep reminding developers of our "resto bloat", and the potential for really doing some fun and necessary things with feral by freeing up those points.

I've been trying to make a minimal tanking spec. In other words, what are the fewest talents I could get away with and still feel I've got all the vital tanking ones. Ultimately I'm trying to see if I can get back to the BC situation I quite enjoyed with good tanking and ok dps.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000
is the best I can do. It doesn't have all the bear damage increases (we'll have to see how threat goes), but I think it has all the mitigation and survival for 51 points. Did I miss anything vital? Any suggestions on how to grow it to decent cat dps?

"It's not Bearwall, but Barskin in Feral might help." - GC.

Finally, now if they can make Frenzied Regen enhanced for Bears too that might be a perfect compliment of 'oh shit' buttons

If you wanted to make that comparison, you'd have to compare the Lvl 80 dodge rate in T6 to pre-kara gear at lvl 70.

26% dodge isn't entirely bad with the old Heavy Clefthoof suit and random blues.

Nice. I wonder if they'll amp it up to Shield Wall level though.

Frenzied Regen can be glyphed to give you +20% healing while activated. That plus Barkskin sounds pretty good actually.

They'll be doing something to nerf Barkskin then because 20% reduced dmg for 12 seconds every minute on top of 12% reduced dmg is pretty insane.

Well if they want barkskin to be like shield wall they will have to "buff" the dmg reduction portion and "nerf" the cooldown so that it is much longer. But then that messes around with PvP resto balance so they can't really do that. They will hopefully just add a new ability for 1 pt deep feral that is like "ironskin" or something and leave barkskin how it is.

I don't think this has been linked yet, but the Naxx 25 man idol is...well terrible in my opinon:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...amas_25_19.jpg

edit: Those stats must be a placeholder, because wowhead has 4 idols with the same stats:
Idols - Items - World of Warcraft
hopefully they will give it survival/mitigation benefits rather than tps benefits

You mean like Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield every minute? Yes, I know DK's have no passive damage mitigation like the other three tank classes do, but those two skills together offer much more DR any other class(while respective abilities are up).

I think people want it to shield wall levels because 20% DR isn't quite the "oh shit" ability. It's a nice "I know I'm going to take more damage for the next X seconds" ability, but in a dire situation, it won't make the difference that shield wall, IBF, or Divine Protection will.

Here's something else that has been bothering me:

Armor - Items - World of Warcraft

We're supposed to share gear. I assume they want us to share leather with rogues and other slots with other tanks. They can't possibly want us to tank in cat rings/necks/etc. So, why are they making so many tanking items that are good for 2-3 of the tanks and awful for us?