Rage is already effectively limitless on large pulls, with the limit on threat being cooldowns, including the global one. Bear dps will only go overboard if swipe is too good an aoe "spell"- and at the moment, nope, not really. Bear dps does go nuts on multipulls on the beta atm, but only when berserk is up. Triple target mangle limited on the global CD cause a lot of numbers on the screen.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...feralstaff.jpg

Not good. Someone's still a little disconnected on a proper itemization upgrade path here. :P

That aside, I'm compiling a list of stuff to pick up ASAP from heroics. So far, I'll be running the heroics these come from religiously till they drop: (All tank loot)

[Enraged Feral Staff] Blue staff (may as well be epic due to how it's itemized. Thanks Blizzard :|) - Utgarde Keep
[Sharp-Barbed Leather Belt] Epic belt
[Keystone Great-Ring] Epic ring - Drak'Tharon
[Offering of Sacrifice] Blue armor trinket - Gun'Drak

Additionally, these are pretty nice upgrades, especially in terms of armor - mitigation upgrades became pretty important again. Not fussed if I can't get them though - they're pretty much marginal upgrades compared to the four above. Also a consideration is enough gem sockets to maintain meta prereqs.

[Slag Footguards] Blue boots
[Bindings of the Tunneler] Blue bracers
[Bile-Cured Gloves] Blue gloves
[Ravenous Leggings of the Furbolg] Blue pants
[Spaulders of the Careless Thief] Blue shoulders

I agree with these two points. With a 1.75 multiplier, tclap does generate more TPS than swipe(this is napkin math including all talents and modifiers). That's not including shockwave. The only numbers I'm unsure about are AP(bear might have more?) and crit(bear would have more innate, but I think Incite would even it out).

I think removing the target cap is a great idea, but it only solves half the problem, and creates others like people have mentioned with Primal Fury. I think putting it on a 6s CD like tclap and then boosting its threat/damage(probably not damage) would solve most problems. Spamming swipe can be a bit tiresome too.

Upped threat on Demo Roar seems a very reasonable solution - has this been brought up on the beta forums?

I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the clarification.

The easiest fix to swipe is to give it a cooldown and make the numbers match thunderclap. Thing is, that's yet another move to homogenize classes, which the devs are trying to minimize. If they want to keep it spammable, simply balancing threat and damage generation assuming a 1mangle/2swipe rotation would make a great deal of sense.

Forget about shockwave; have you looked at warriors' damage shield? It trounces thorns in both damage done and threat by several massive orders of magnitude. Thorns very much needs to scale with gear.

Speaking of Itemization, Falk, I too a little confused by the choice of upgrade path we should take.

To compare, my beta druid comes fully equipped with Deadly Gladiators Band of Victory


84 Stam
38 Hit
37 Resilience (Useless)
112 AP


I have 25 emblems of heroism to burn. Here are my upgrade options:

Standard tanking ring, Signet of the Impregnable Fortress

84 Stam
38 Strength
56 Defense
27 Hit
21 Expertise


Or the typical DPS ring, Ring of Invincibility

55 Stam
28 Agi
43 Crit
38 Haste
112 AP


As you can see the Ilvl are the same for all the rings, I'm just trying to dump the PVP ring since it has wasted item budget on resil. However the tanking ring has semi wasted budget stats on defense as well. Its difficult to choose a clear upgrade, although I may go with the DPS ring even though the stams lower.

Its obvious they want us to wear rogue (read DPS) gear for armor spots, but for jewelry and trinkets its not so cut and dry. Does anyone know if Rawr is updated for beta level 80 combat ratings yet?

I suppose I'm a greedy bastard, but I like the 'Bearstomp' described above. It'd give bears one more button to push instead of the same-old same-old. A Knockdown seems fitting and it'd hit the full 360 degrees radius. A small interrupt on it would be funky.

Mind you, 180 degrees on swipe isn't all *that* bad from a technical point of view anyway. You really rather not have mobs behind you as it nixes your avoidance.

A better scaling thorns would be lovely - and one that lasts for longer than a boss fight would be appreciated as well. I dislike the idea of having to go "Sorry guys, gonna be in caster form for a few seconds - gotta rebuff Thorns" if they do give it something more to be the rough equal of the returned damage shields other classes have.

A prot paladin who is using Blessing of Sanctuary and JoW will have unlimited mana on any large pull. A prot warrior should have near unlimited rage from shield block + shield spec (100% block + 2 rage per block for 10 seconds, every 40 seconds) along with rage gains from multiple mobs attacking. I can't speak to how DK resources work.

However, paladins and warriors are defiantly in a similar "rage" situation to ferals on large pulls.

Promethius:

The game is definitely not balanced around powerleveling. I only brought that up as an interesting side note. With a druid PL, however, you probably won't ever reach the same amount of mobs you get as a paladin because you will be spamming swipe as you grab more mobs. As a result, mobs will die as you move on. This may require lowbies to actually follow you and not just wait at the entrance as the prot paladin pulls everything back, but speed-wise it will be very comparable.

Back on the issue of raiding: I'm not going to try to propose how to "balance" swipe because unless we get new toys to compensate, this is a good band-aid fix that should not be taken away. On the threat issue: do bears have problems holding aggro on single target, or 3 mob packs that's going to be most prevalent on encounters that matters, that we know about? I don't think threat is going to be a big issue if all 4 tanks are well ahead of off the DPS/healer, but have some discrepancy amongst themselves. However, if bears (or any tanks) have a significant harder time to even maintain aggro over DPS in a reasonable situation, then it should be addressed.

Even right now, unless prot paladins pop everything they have, AoEers (especially warlocks) still need to give it a couple of seconds before they go happy with tab-seeding.

Feral druid is always one expansion behind. Such is the fate of an extreme role changer. However if they are able to make us 95% tank and 95% dps, then I don't think I have a problem with that.

The devs are not aiming for 95% tank and 95% DPS. They want players to be forced to choose between 100% tank or 100% DPS. Cat spec druids should tank as well as an arms/fury warrior, bear spec druids should DPS as well as a prot warrior. In other words, hybridism is dead. Feedback should take that goal into account.

This I understand. However, the current reality is that there are specs that almost maximizes the role of both tanking and dps at the same time. In addition, when I talked about proposed changes, I did not have Cat DPS or any other non-bear utility in mind. It might have been confusing to mash those in the same post, and I do apologize about that.

Theorycrafting speaking (I don't raid on beta so still need beta raider's input), mitigation doesn't seem to be too bad, and Damage actually looks very solid as a bear (Other tanking classes are pretty close, but it looks like bear still has the best damage overall?). Since our threat scales with damage, and Salvation and Defiance part of NS has been rolled into bear form, at least bear form speaking threat doesn't appear to be a big issue. On larger pack AoE it might be, but that's fixable by increasing the threat modifier of swipe when it hits X number of targets without touching damage, if necessary.

Offtopic: Although they are pushing for specialization. The reality of the druid class is that our physical damage and tanking tree exist in the same tree, and unless it is extremely bloated (much more so than even right now), then a complete sacrifice of DPS for tanking will be impossible. Druids by nature has been the damage-tanking class. Other classes seem to be closer to us now, but the gap is still there since we get a lot of AP and Crit from our gear.