Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion - Page 142

Neddie · 09/19/08, 3:48 PM

There are two things you want to try to do with multi-mob tanking. One is to generate enough threat on all the mobs quick enough that none of them run past you and start attacking your healer. The second is to generate enough threat on all of them that AoEers can feel free to unload on them.

There are also two types of multi-mob tanking. The first is dealing with a small pack (3-6) of elites. In most cases holding threat against the healers is good enough here, you can just focus on generating threat on one mob and have the DPS focus on that one mob. The second type of multi-mob tanking is dealing with big packs (6-20) of non-elites: the elementals after Naj'entus, the groups in supremus' area, etc. For these you want to be able to hold threat against AoEers.

I can see how a multi-target mangle will help make sure that a small group (3-6) of elites doesn't run past us and eat our healers. I don't see how it will help us much with the big packs. Even if we're really lucky and hit a different 2 each time, hitting 8 non-elites at least once will take 4 gcds. Needing to have healers wait 6s before starting to heal you sounds like having a druid try to tank packs of non-elites will result in a lot of dead healers.

tlbj6142 · 09/19/08, 6:13 PM

Originally Posted by Neddie

I can see how a multi-target mangle will help make sure that a small group (3-6) of elites doesn't run past us and eat our healers.

That's all I really want. For those 5-6 pulls in 5-mans when you don't have enough, or the right type of, CC.

I don't see how it will help us much with the big packs (of non-elites).

I have yet to see this scenario as being a big problem (illhoof??). But, then, I've only raided thru T4.

Duilliath · 09/19/08, 6:16 PM

Originally Posted by tlbj6142

I have yet to see this scenario as being a big problem (illhoof??). But, then, I've only raided thru T4.

Same here - we've done perfectly fine in MH without a Paladin tank. The only time we really wanted (and had a Holy Paladin respec) was on Morogrim. Even that we've done with Ferals / Warriors. I wouldn't mind being able to hold 10+ mobs like they're glued to me, but in all honesty - holding 4-5 with ease works perfectly fine for me. So far, it looks like these changes will do that for us.

Tappin · 09/19/08, 7:38 PM

I'm not convinced we'll need AE threat. I've been fine with swipe without an AE, and now swipe is considerably better. More classes have AE abilities, but maybe they'll have to wait 2 seconds before they unload like that. We'll also have AE taunt available a lot more.

That said, I haven't played beta. Some say you absolutely need it. IF they're right, I think it makes a lot more sense to add AE threat to an ability bears already have than to have bears bringing lightning from above. An easy fix could be to add a sizeable threat bonus to demo roar. Warriors wouldn't like it because they sometimes demo shout while dps'ing. Bears pretty much only roar when we're tanking / offtanking.

(Side note: I have a friend who loves to whirlwind on my heroic pulls. I don't get off 1 swipe, let alone 2-3 before he does it. He won't listen to reason. I never taunt off him. He dies often and I make fun of him. The taunt stays for the healer who probably has aggro from healing him).

seminarca · 09/19/08, 9:50 PM

New build today:

Skills
Feral

* Dash cooldown reduced from 5 to 3 minutes.
* Faerie Fire (Feral) isn't a talent anymore and is now a baseline skill

Feral

* Berserk doesn't heal you anymore in bear form but causes your Mangle (Bear) ability to hit up to 3 targets and have no cooldown instead.
* Rend and Tear now increases damage done by Maul and Shred on bleeding targets by 4/8/12/16/20%. (up from 2/4/6/8/10%)
* Mangle doesn't increase the damage of Maul and Shred anymore
* Protector of the Pack now increases your attack power in Bear and Dire Bear form by 2/4/6%. (Old - increased the bonus attack power by 20/40/60%)
* Predatory Instincts changed from 5 to 3 points, now While in Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form, increases your damage from melee critical strikes by 3/7/10% (Old - 2/4/6/8/10%) and reduces the damage taken from area of effect attacks by 5/10/15%. (Old - 3/6/9/12/15%)
* Savage Fury has been moved from Tier 5 to Tier 2
* Brutal Impact moved from Tier 2 to Tier 5
* *New Talent* Survival Instincts (Tier 3) - When activated, this ability temporarily grants you 30% of your maximum health for 20 sec while in Bear Form, Cat Form, or Dire Bear Form. After the effect expires, the health is lost. Instant, 5 min cooldown

raffy · 09/19/08, 9:50 PM

(removed, I was too late :P)

-- R&T seems pretty nice now.
-- PI at 3 pts seems much better.

I'd still say that Berserk's cooldown should be 2 minutes. I also think there should be a bigger effort to get Lacerate's threat adjusted.

seminarca · 09/19/08, 9:59 PM

Sadris does have a Lacerate thread going, but unfortunately we haven't seen any attention in it.

Rend and Tear does seem nice now, it makes a much stronger case for itself for both threat and DPS now. The Protector of the Pack change from just Bear Form's bonus AP to total Bear Form AP is great as well. At least it will scale with gear instead of being just a trivial amount of static AP.

Falk · 09/19/08, 10:20 PM

Originally Posted by Phorage

There is a trinket in wowhead database (cannot link for some reason) like this:

Defender's Code
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
850 Armor
Requires Level 80
Use: Increases parry dodge by 455 for 20 sec. (2 Min Cooldown)

Looks like a really awesome upgrade from BoT. Also it has the parry dodge thing mentioned earlier.

Originally Posted by Pzychotix

Wow, the armor on that thing is ridiculous.

Ridiculously sexy.

Probably going to be using both BoT and this new trinket, unless there's another hot trinket out there.

Originally Posted by Vaccine

Does this concern anyone else? They get into the Badge of Tenacity situation once more where they either completely shackle us to one trinket for the entire expansion (least its epic this time!)

ImageShack - Hosting :: wowscrnshot092008023007pd5.jpg

Seems to me they're having clear itemization upgrade paths for armor rings, armor cloaks, armor necks and armor trinkets this time around. The only problem I can foresee is that armor is 'so good' a stat that you'd probably stack both trinket slots with armor. If there was a way to limit trinket slots to 1 armor-type and 'free up' the other for a wider variety of choices, it'd both preserve some decision making as well as toning down bear armor vs plate classes (which, post-body slot nerfs, still comes out pretty much significantly higher). I don't see how it would be technically possible, though.

Edit: (May be horribly mistaken from missing some prior discussion) Seems to me the Defender's Code clicky is a typo more than anything. Probably it was a cut and paste from some other trinket by some intern before a hypothetical senior dude of some flavor caught the fact that druids can't parry, resulting in the hasty/sloppy change?

Edit edit: Yeah, read back a few pages. Disregard edit.

• sadris · 09/19/08, 10:37 PM

Originally Posted by seminarca

Sadris does have a Lacerate thread going, but unfortunately we haven't seen any attention in it.

Rend and Tear does seem nice now, it makes a much stronger case for itself for both threat and DPS now. The Protector of the Pack change from just Bear Form's bonus AP to total Bear Form AP is great as well. At least it will scale with gear instead of being just a trivial amount of static AP.

Blizzard said they didn't want to buff Swipe because would be "all we use." I told them that we don't use Lacerate because Swipe is more TPS.

Does Deep Wounds count as a bleed for the purposes of Rend and Tear providing a bonus?

Tappin · 09/19/08, 10:54 PM

* Mangle doesn't increase the damage of Maul and Shred anymore
- I think this is incorrect? It looks like they just moved the effect to mangle and shred so it works with mangle OR trauma.

Rend and Tear - The new one seems good. 20% more to maul is probably worth skipping improved mangle? Maul's looking sick. Unless I'm missing something it would be pretty easy to get maul to do:

Base Maul x 1.2 (Savage Fury) x 1.2 (RnT) x 1.3 (Mangle) x 1.1 (Naturalist) = 2.06 x Base Maul damage?

For a mostly tank but I still dps pretty well build, I'm looking at:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000

Missing survivability talents tanking talents: Feral Aggression, Instincts
Missing dps talents: imp mangle (minor for cat), FA (minor unless dps rotations change later), Instincts (hurts), Master shapeshifter (expensive)

The struggle for me is currently between rend and tear, instincts, iLotP and improved mangle.
RnT - pretty nice bump in cat dps, a large amount of threat, especially for infinite mana fights.
Improved mangle - a nice bump in threat, but RnT is probably more threat and definitely more cat dps
Instincts - 15% more AE damage tanking might be an issue.
ILotP - nice to bring to the raid, but the 60-70% overheal still bothers me.

Really having a tough time with the last two. More dps and I take less AE damage, or free heals for the raid?

Pzychotix · 09/19/08, 10:55 PM

Yes for deep wounds being a bleed.

Only problem at the moment is figuring whether Arms is viable enough to convince your friendly DPS warrior to spec into.

Falk · 09/19/08, 11:11 PM

Originally Posted by Tappin

* Mangle doesn't increase the damage of Maul and Shred anymore
- I think this is incorrect? It looks like they just moved the effect to mangle and shred so it works with mangle OR trauma.

Yeah, tooltips were changed around to be more intuitive. Maul now reads "Effects which increase bleed damage also increase Maul damage." Ditto shred.

Kazanir · 09/19/08, 11:19 PM

This is a fairly simple ability that could go somewhere in the feral tree and fix all the concerns about AoE tanking without being imba or replacing Swipe and Lacerate.

Grizzly's Bellow - 20 rage - 20s cooldown

A roar that deals a large amount of threat to all creatures within 20 yards in front of the bear, increasing in effectiveness if there are a greater number of enemies present.

Mechanics: 180 degree, 20 yard radius shout. Deals less threat than a Swipe to fewer than 5 targets. Same as a Swipe for 5, and adding 20% threat per target for each one above 5. This means that with 10 targets, you'd be doing 2x the threat of a Swipe on a 20-second cooldown. That seems reasonable to me off the top of my head -- certainly not overpowered. It would be usable as a snap aggro device, increase overall threat on large AoE packs while not being spammable, and wouldn't replace Swipe or Lacerate in any way.

Cuer · 09/20/08, 12:09 AM

Originally Posted by Tappin

The struggle for me is currently between rend and tear, instincts, iLotP and improved mangle.
RnT - pretty nice bump in cat dps, a large amount of threat, especially for infinite mana fights.
Improved mangle - a nice bump in threat, but RnT is probably more threat and definitely more cat dps
Instincts - 15% more AE damage tanking might be an issue.
ILotP - nice to bring to the raid, but the 60-70% overheal still bothers me.

Really having a tough time with the last two. More dps and I take less AE damage, or free heals for the raid?

The tree is looking much better at the moment; there are some interesting choices to be made in talent selection, but not so many options that it feels truly "bloated", to use that term the developers love to hate.

It'll have to be tested to be certain, but with a 3 minute Berserk providing no-cooldown Mangles, it seems likely that Improved Mangle can be left out of a standard tanking spec, if necessary. Popping Berserk relatively early in a fight should give enough threat to keep ahead of the healers/DPS, at least for single targets and small packs.

ILotP is hard to give up, if you plan on doing feral PVP at all. Apart from the health restoration, it provides the only method we have of handling our tiny mana pool, since it looks like we won't be getting any Intellect itemized on feral gear. Given the shapeshifting we do during PVP, or shifting out to heal, ILotP is now incredibly useful to maintain mana.

Valerian · 09/20/08, 12:35 AM

Pure DPS
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000

With the recent reduction this seems to get everything. If FB turns out to be poor this can even get Infected Wounds and you can be the attack speed debuffer as well as have all the DPS talents.

Pure tanking still looks tight though. Even if we can skip improve mangle, doesn't it seem odd to anyone else that half this talent is therefore useless? I mean if we can determine its suboptimal to take cooldown on mangle that talent becomes another very marginal one. I mean I can see trying to decide between things like Improved Bash and Primal Tenacity (where both have pros and cons), but when a talent is just plain sub-optimal there's a problem. Another example is Master Shapeshifter. That 4% damage bonus while nice is just too deep to feasibly get and therefore will never be taken (maybe in a PvP build...even then though).