The major issue would be the placing of these oh-so-powerful trinkets. If they again place one of the best tanking trinkets or best DPS trinkets on entry-level raiding (Naxx 10), people wanting to raid 25 mans above all need to go back into 10-level content and farm those items. It's one thing if the best items are placed at the very hardest content; it makes more sense - as you progress you get better gear. It shouldn't be - as you progress you need to go back to the instances you could clear with your eyes closed to get the better gear.

I wouldn't mind keeping the same trinket for all of eternity if it is the best (as it is now with BoT), but I wouldn't want to go into a 10-man to get it when my guild will solely be focusing on 25-mans.

Although, where exactly do they drop? MMO just says "dropping in raids".


Can't really see why it would matter as long as we don't need to pick up bad talents to go further up in the tree - which it doesn't really look like. Savage Fury is still okay for cats. I haven't looked at the numbers though: would you be not taking it in an "ultimate" dps build?

The 3% damage reduction for all ranks has been confirmed as a tooltip bug. It does in fact still provide 1/2/3% DR per party member. Here's hoping that they change the AP bonus to something less crappy, though.

I'm really liking the changes mentioned in the last page. FFF as base has been a long time coming, and splitting Berserk up so it's an entirely offensive talent, while simultaneously giving us a real Last Stand is a very positive change. I'm starting to feel a lot better about sticking to Feral in Wrath.

Well, possibly not; we're pulling ahead again in terms of armour and stamina, meaning less chance to be killed by an unlucky avoidance streak. Considering inspiration/LoH and berserk will increase our hp and armour then by proportionally more, it's very possible barkskin, berserk and frenzied regen (glyphed) will be equal to warriors last stand + SW.

I've been a bit critical of what they were doing with ferals a few times in this thread, but I might(MIGHT!!) have to change my mind. I've accepted not getting fur wall, specifically because of brez and innervate. Even while MTing, those are probably equal. And brez/innervate are infinitely more useful while not tanking.

There remains two things I'd like resolved:

-AoE threat. Swipe is trite and borderline useless. It should be treated like the Paladin's HoR, a cherry on the top of a sweet ability. I really like Liar's idea of Bearricane. This one doesn't seem like a tough one to solve, even if they do a hack job on swipe.

-Tanking rotation. Just something new to do, because it's looking like mangle, maul, swipe/lacerate all over again. Bearricane might change this up enough, though.

Another interesting possibility... with the new berserk, the 3 pts in improved mangle might now be skippable and put into something else...

Berserk is on a 3 minute cooldown... you still want Imp Mangle for the rest of the time.

I agree. As long as the cooldown is 1m (the typical "once per pull" cooldown length) we could use it as such. Though on a long boss fight we'd end up as kings of threat as 15s of mangle once per minute would be OP in a single target scenario. So, I'm not sure how Blizzard would balance things in a raid boss scenario.

For AoE trash, we'd pull one of the mobs with roots, shift to bear, enrage (lowers armor giving you more rage) and berserk. Tab (or mouseover) mash mangle for 15s. That would generate a huge amount of threat on a pack of mobs. More than enough to overcome healing. Once the berserk effect wears off, you could swipe once in a while, but I doubt you'd need to, which means you can tank the rest of the fight like a single target fight. We might even want to pop our dodge trinkets (if we have one) during enrage so get more rage from Natural Reaction.

What we don't know right now is the CD for the new berserk. Has it changed? Or is it still 3m? At 3m we could still use it every other pull.

Edit: Another nice side effect of the new Berserk is that combined with 3/3 IW you ought to be able to fully slow down those mobs you just mangled for 15s, further reducing their ability to run away from you.

Wrong type of "more buttons to press". I hear Paladins are looking for more buttons to press too, why don't you suggest to them that they only use HotR to hold AE agro. With a 6 second cooldown, it will be even more challenging. I mean fun. And warriors can only use cleave. Death Knights? Pestilence.

Tab-targeting is not fun, it never will be. Furthermore, it severely hampers our ability to keep agro on the main target. It just stinks of work-around because Blizzard couldn't design a true ability designed for AE. I'm frankly surprised at how many of you are suggesting using Berserk to hold AE agro.

As for lore...bears are already casting sparkly little...things on their target. You're going to have problems with them summoning a storm, which they can do in caster form?

In addition to that, it remains to be seen how important 33% more mangles are relative to 33% less swipes/lacerates in terms of overall threat. It will be a boost, but from what I've seen so far the boost is not huge.

The expertise on Heroes helm and Valorous legs have both been changed to armor penetration rating. I would have much preferred something other than ArP. Only the value of the stats varies between Heroes and Valorous now. It would have been much more beneficial to let us mix and match different stats from the sets to increase our expertise if desired for bear.

Because it is significantly better than anything we have had to-date. I really just want to be able to hold 4-5 mobs. Not dozens. Berserk-Mangle-Tab-Mangle-Tab-Mangle-Tab-Mangle-Tab (I'd just put it in a macro) would probably be all it will take to accomplish this. So, if it takes extra skill to do so, I'm fine with that. It gives me something to differentiate myself from other bears.