Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion - Page 125

Clausm · 09/12/08, 12:09 PM

What would you say about this build, guys:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Valerian · 09/12/08, 12:09 PM

Do those new staves replace the one that was previewed that had the 59 Expertise on it? Or was that a Naxx 10 staff?

Emi · 09/12/08, 12:17 PM

Originally Posted by Valerian

Do those new staves replace the one that was previewed that had the 59 Expertise on it? Or was that a Naxx 10 staff?

Indeed the one with 59 expertise was from Naxx10.
100 Str
72 Agil
150 Stam
59 Expertise
2048 FAP

Frankly the Naxx 10 seems very interesting as well.

On the builds subject, i have something like this for a pure Raid DPS role in mind.

loos · 09/12/08, 12:29 PM

Originally Posted by Emi

On the builds subject, i have something like this for a pure Raid DPS role in mind.

I was just wondering why you chose Genesis over Master Shapeshifter. Do you feel that 0.05 * 0.25 = 1.25% more damage really worth more than 4% crit? After talking to Toskk and Astrylian over at Toskk's page, they were informing me that Genesis was one of the more lackluster dps talents.

Vvildcard · 09/12/08, 12:34 PM

Those weapons induce a gag reflex for me. I hate how blah all the itemization is getting. Those are the exact same weapons with 1 stat difference between the two. What fun is a game where everything gets reduced to it's simplest common denominator?

What's stopping us from just reducing everything to:

Random Armor of Illidan
Chest
Power: +1000

Random Armor of Kel'Thuzad
Chest
Power: +2000

(Note: To make sure nobody gets left out, I eliminated Cloth, Leather, Mail and Plate armor classes)

Everyone can just have one stat called Power that lets you know exactly how balanced you are compared to everyone else. This way nobody gets confused about trying to twist their class into something that wasn't as designed... blah blah blah... Boring game.

A big part of the appeal of these RPG games is figuring this stuff out. Yeah, it's a PITA sometimes but that's part of the reason we are here... we actually enjoy doing that. Stripping the game down to something so linear as having one piece of armor for each class/spec (or even worse, one piece of armor for 3+ classes/specs) is just bland and boring.

I hope I'm not over the line with my little rant here... I'm sorry if it is. The point I'm really just trying to make is that I feel like Blizzard has been pushing us (as players) into a mold and eventually everything is going to be so 'balanced' that the game's variety will be gone and the life will be sucked out of it.

Why can't classes have a niche anymore? Are things really so bad that we can't figure out ways to adapt to situations when the ideal setup isn't available?

kalbear · 09/12/08, 12:37 PM

Agreed. Genesis is going to be the worst dps per talent point talent for a feral. Rip, at best, does 30% of overall damage, and this is assuming things like double mangled rips. This means that each talent point has the potential to increase your DPS by 1%*.3 = .3%. This is worse than master shapeshifter and even worse than improved mangle.

I also think that not taking improved Leader of the Pack is a mistake, though perhaps not right now. My suspicion is that this is going to be buffed to increase the likelihood of bringing a feral druid as a cat.

Emi · 09/12/08, 12:40 PM

Well nothing is set in stone that is for sure and even more so at this stage. Hell, i'm still having doubts on what to respec when the patch hits.
I will probably lean a bit more to the tank talents as thats pretty much how im seeing myself doing instances when WotLK hits, not to mention that i actually like tanking.

Edit: Well, if ILotP is buffed then i'll reevaluate the situation. Until it is, or if it ever will be, the only way i see that i'll pick it up is knowing that i'll have a warrior TC'ing on the regular raid team. In which case i can drop 2pts from IW into it.

• Vykromond · 09/12/08, 12:45 PM

edit: Missed an entire page of thread. Sorry!

edit: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft for raid DPS I think.

* There's no room for ILotP in a DPS build really. The effect has been marginal for a while so I don't think this is a big deal.
* Similarly, there's no room for Infected Wounds. Infected Wounds is a pretty terrible talent, one of the least inspiring TBC additions. Balance has Earth and Moon, so Feral isn't the worst off here, but the only reason you would take Infected Wounds is if you're in a 10-man group lacking the other forms of the debuff.
* Feral Charge could be dropped, but I think it has some valuable utility, and it's only 1 point.
* I don't think any of the current talent points spent contribute less to total DPS than points in Genesis would. If there are useless points in the tree they can be hypothetically replaced with points in Genesis though.

kalbear · 09/12/08, 1:05 PM

For pure dps, vrykromond, it would be better to go with feral aggression. Doing so basically guarantees you won't tank anything particularly hard, but it is a dps upgrade, especially if you ferocious bite at all. And from my admittedly limited experience in the beta, ferocious bite's DPS has been significantly improved. I was getting 4k ferocious bite crits in my 'threat' set, which is for tanking. And that was without feral aggression and only at level 70.

It still is not as much as rip does over time, especially against harder mobs, but it could be worth it to blow through energy and then tiger's fury back.

gnoop · 09/12/08, 1:13 PM

Originally Posted by Tappin

That looks like kind of a hybrid build rather than pure dps. For pure dps, you could drop thick hide, instincts and infected wounds?

Agreed on thick hide, but cat currently has more room for infected wounds than bear, at least for me. I couldn't do a pure bear build without taking some dps talents, so dropping down to 1/3 IW is what I end up with. With 3/3 IW as a cat, you're providing a nice boost using skills already in your regular rotation. If you've got a bear, he'll end up being your mangle bot so it works out nicely as a division of labor.

For a 10-man set up, I can see where things would change. I was admittedly thinking more 25-man.

loos · 09/12/08, 3:02 PM

Quick question. I know as druids hit isn't the most important stat we can get, but we've always wanted some of it. So, while looking through gear to see if I got enough expertise from gear to drop primal precision I found the following statistics:

           Exp   Hit     Name
Head       43    0       
Neck       38    24      Colar of Dissolution
Shoulders  0     0       
Back       0     21      Cloak Of Mastery
Chest      35    0       
Wrist      0     0       Sinner's Bindings, Wristwraps of the Cutthroat, Cuffs of Dark Shadows
Gloves     0     0       
Waist      38    0       Jorach's Crocolisk Skin Belt
Legs       37    0       
Feet       0     0       Boots of Captain Ellis
Ring       33    0       Circle of Death
Ring       0     0       
Trinket    N/A   N/A         
Trinket    N/A   N/A 
Weapon     59    0       Staff of the Plaguehound
Idol       N/A   N/A

Total      283   45

Max Needed 214   296

I assume

Naxx-10 tier pieces
Other pieces as noted
Slots that aren't yet implemented are marked as N/A
I couldn't find a second ring that had hit or exp (hence the 0/0)

To find pieces I basically went to the WotLK version of WoW Head and looked at all the purple items added in WotLK.

So, onto my question. We're fine for expertise (going far over the cap without any gems or enchants), but we seem serverely limited on hit. Should we be worried? Or is there some other stat->hit conversion I'm unaware of?

nightcrowler · 09/12/08, 3:08 PM

Originally Posted by Emi

I was actually expecting to see some hit and/or expertise on both staffs considering previous gear examples that we've seen. Expertise seems abundant but hit rating not as much.

In Naxx10 you will expertise capped both in bear and cat gear. In Naxx25 you will probably be both hit and expertise capped so there is no need to put it on our staves.

Valerian · 09/12/08, 3:10 PM

Hmm I had forgotten about the scaling on the actual speed/attack speed reduction on IW per talent point. Less than 3 points in here just seems pointless now, which makes it even worse than before (and makes the bloat even worse).

I suspect the reason we're so easily fitting it in the "DPS" spec is because the new DPS talents haven't been released yet (assuming that wasn't just a lie from Blizz).

Also its very odd how those staves are itemized, compared to the Naxx 10 one.

Comparissons between Naxx 25 and Naxx 10:

Both have a Stat at 100
Both have a Stat at 150 (well 151 for one of the Naxx 25 ones)
Naxx 25 has one stat that is 5 points higher (77 vs 72)
Naxx 10 has one stat 8 points higher (59 vs 51)
Naxx 25 has 36 more FAP.

Something doesn't look right there. Besides the FAP, the Naxx 10 and Naxx 25 staff have pretty much the same item budget.

Schnigges · 09/12/08, 4:09 PM

Expertise is more worth than crit rating and agility more than strength in itempoints?

Edit again: They both have the same value and iLvl wheras the staves in the 25 man drops from normal bosses and the DPS one from the 10 man drops from KT.

Maeltne · 09/12/08, 4:16 PM

Originally Posted by Schnigges

Expertise is more worth than crit rating and agility more than strength in itempoints?

Nope. All stats and ratings are valued equally, except for stamina which is worth .66 of the rest.