While this is true, it depends heavily on blizzards vision for Cats & Bears. If they are forcing us to choose between full out DPS with the ability to OT trash or boss trash, or having the ability to be the guilds MT then the bloat is justified. If not then it is truely just bloat.

Deliverance said it best, an answer from the blue's would help sort out what we can expect from the talents as well as their thoughts for end game feral druids.

And the current form of windfury isnt? Unfearable warriors with S4 swords and windfury make my healers cry.

Very good point there Snarley.

After all they should know what they want, and if they explicitly state, well, then they can change their mind later on, but overall they are on a route then (animal forms are not as versatile as their counterpart classes but can be considered equally powerful changed to animal forms are weaker than their counterparts).

Someone from Beta should go into the forums and get a clue by asking for a blue response to:

- Do you want us to be DPS+OT OR MT+LowerAverageDPS?
- Do you want to allow talent specs to be instant swichting with no cooldown
- Do you consider the current Feral Combat Tree (and its required Restoration Tree Talents) to be bloated?

If neither is the case (or is being answered), the tree is bloated.

That is a nice overall build, though I'm not sure that 4/5 Predatory Instincts and 5/5 Rend and Tear beats 5/5 PI and 4/5 R&T in a build that does not utilize FB. I was neither agreeing nor disagreeing with Ghostcrawler's position on the current setup of talents, merely reporting on intentions and what they seem to imply with respects to slimming our trees so we can get even more of what we like.

That said, your general build does exclude a couple of really nice talents for both cat and bear and even your dedicated cat build cannot find the points to include utility functionality such as Nurturing Instinct and Improved Leader of the Pack, while your dedicated bear build lacks Feral Aggression (a trivial loss in 25 mans, since you'll probably have a warrior around with improved demoralising, a potentially important loss in 10 mans depending on your raid setup) and Intensity (always nice but not essential). For 25 man raiding, I'd probably agree with you regarding being able to get all you really want to feel content because we can count on other classes compensating for us not taking utility and debuff improving talents, for 10 man, I'm not so sure. (Especially now that the highest ranks of demoralising shout/roar are only something like 2 AP from each other).

Regarding IW, it is possible to have effects where only part of them are applied to a mob while it is immune to other parts, and as was discussed in posts earlier in the thread, there are good reasons why it should apply its attack speed debuff to bosses. (Specifically, having all tanking classes able to apply an essential raid debuff - rather important if the 10 man progression raids are tuned anywhere near as much as the 25 man raids have been). That does not mean that it will, of course, and right now it does not - some are immune, some are not.

Since you are in the beta (which I, alas, am not), if you have the time please help contribute to this thread covering which bosses are immune to IW.

That to me is a true wild card at the moment. Not only does this change just about everything end game raid wise, it could start making raid encounters a bit rediculous if theres no cooldown and you can just click a button and instantly go xx spec. (Think of encounters that are designed with your raid to instantly have 10 healers instead of 5 and for all those "hybrid" healers to understand how to properly raid heal)

Even if they force us to go to town for an instant "free" respec between our two choosen talent specs, it (while being an annoyance) is still viable to quickly switch someone from MT to fury dps for example.

Also think about the implications for PvP, if you know you keep going up against the same team makeup, and one of your specs is a much better counter to the opposing team... Well click the magic button and now your double healer dps instead of double dps healer.

That brings up the further issue of min/maxing - if a Feral can do both tanking and DPSing roles, to what level of viability does he need to be able to do either in order to make bringing him worth it over using a single tank or DPS class?

The "way the class is designed" is flucuating - pre TBC the only really viable spec was Resto, although Feral got better it was never really accepted as a standard spec by most people (see the Tier sets pre-TBC). I agree that being able to be viable at both is part of the point of using a Druid, but being better than or equivalent to other classes at both is not (at certain points in TBC progression a Druid is equivalent to both a Rogue and a Warrior at the same time, albeit with a gear swap). The talents themselves are evolving to allow this, with SotF giving all the crit reduction required as an example.



As per the above posts, tanking will become a strong point for bears as far as I see it, due to the crushing blow nerf. Through that change along with the change to make SotF give 6% crit reduction, tanking in full cat gear is suddenly viable for the majority of trash and a good portion of Boss adds (with overgearing slightly this was possible during TBC). Even if it's not possible to tank in full out DPS gear, the level of DPS given up in order to perform that role is diminished due to those changes. Certainly hybrid gear with high armour, medium-high stamina and then good DPS stats is looking more appealing without having to hit an anti-crit gear target.



The other interesting aspect for discussion is the potential DPS cycle changes.
- Warrior bleed damage increase talent in Arms (Trauma - 30% increased damage);
- 4% more crit (although diminished scaling crit from Agility);
- Change of Rip with 5 CP's providing more AP contribution to damage;
- 50% more crit with FB when on a bleeding target; and
- Rework in the change of OoC to provide more procs with haste.

Assuming these changes, is there likely to be a point where it's viable to:
- Use Rake in a rotation for FB crit chance when no other class is providing bleeds?
- Use Mangle more often than the debuff timer?
- Use a finisher methodology that allows Savage Fury to be up consistently, with Rip and Ferocious Bite being used as necessary to provide FB with the additional crit when not using Rake?

These are interesting questions but bring up more about the crit rate at 80, the likely uptime of other classes bleed effects and composition of raids, and the general theorycrafting behind the new improved damage on Shred compared to the Mangle cost decrease with 2t6. They're all subject to change too.

As far as I can estimate based on current knowledge/early TBC experience of timers, combo point generation and similar effects, at early level 80 levels it's likely to be hard to keep both Savage Fury and Rip running at the same time. With an Arms warrior I doubt it will ever be effective to use FB even with the 15% increased damage talent, due to the 30% increase in bleed damage and the minor buff to Rip damage from AP contribution. Still, with 50% increase crit chance giving a likely 75-80% total crit chance, it will be interesting to see the results of a comparison with all factors taken in to account (which unfortunately I do not have the time for right now).

What are your thoughts on this change though with respect to Bear tanking, especially in high rage situations? It's been a while since I paid attention to it, but I remember on Morogrim being able to count the number of melee strikes on one hand.

Although less pertinent to min/maxing bear tanking or cat dps viability, also remember that blizzard stated that they wanted to reduce the overall lack of tanks available. Due to the community complaining that no tanks were ever around for 5 mans/10 mans.

E: Eh, crap. Didn't see the post earlier.

Anyway, This seems to indicate exactly what we're all thinking. You (rightly) choose between DPS and Tanking talents.

Personally, barring any changes (...), I'll probably be speccing something like this, which is a pure DPS spec, but should still be able to tank heroics and raid trash.

All I'm really losing out on is 4% dodge, 6% armour and some AoE threat, which isn't all that much if you're looking at the whole package.

Does anyone else see our first tier set having a bonus for Savage Roar uptime a la Rogue 2T4?

At first I was really hesitant about WotLK, but now I'm getting excited. It should be a fun expansion.

Look at the rogues talent trees. Set them as a baseline for 100% Max DPS (as they dont do much anything else) and you will see that they can chose between doing it this or that way.

Feral though will, in regards to PvE and its role there, be rather nerfed:

"If you look at the feral tree for Lich King, you'll see that it does have more bear-centric and cat-centric talents. If you pick the cat-centric talents, you'll still be able to tank to some extent, but you probably aren't your guild's main tank."
WoW Forums -> [Suggestion] Talent For Death knight Tanking.

Somehow I feel that Bear will be weaker than Prot Warriors and Prot Paladins but will still not excel IN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GEAR as a dps to around 90% the damage of rogues - even not while gimping our tanking abilities and vica versa.

But yes, we have the answer, the bloat is intention.

edit: there is a followup on the official beta forum (no blue yet though) on our role/purpose and the removal of our two-role spec.
WoW Forums -> Follow up on druid comment in DK thread

I would say they miserably failed on that on then, there is no way shape or form enough bloat to even come close to supporting 2 separate specs. Not to mention pre 1.8 proved that sort of design philosophy fails miserable. Honestly I would question if that blue ever even actually looked at the tree.

Don't see too many cat/bear only talents Here

Ok, considering that this is a blue post and it truly is intentional I would expect to see the following.

DPS in Cat form (All conceivable cat talents chosen) - The capability to match all other hybrid DPS if not exceed it by a small amount. The capability to tank trash mobs as well as 5 mans / 10 mans OT (10 mans is a toss up as it completely depends on how they tune these instances...). Assuming a stellar tank set, the ability to MT most 10 mans that are below that gear level.

Bear MT (All conceivable bear talents chosen) - The capability to MT 25 mans the same as the other tank classes (gimmick encounters aside)

Now, of course these are my opinions but if our tree is being split on purpose into cat / bear with fewer crossovers between the two. You are now graying the line of a true hybrid and the spec should be treated a bit differently since we are now supposed to choose what we want to be, DPS boon or an MT.

Be that as it may, the blue poster wasn’t a dev himself and I would hope that the devs either see it differently or there are much more changes coming to split the tree further...

If they are truly saying that we are to spec for either cat or bear in the same tree, then I better be damn good at which ever spec I choose.

With that philosophy in mind, I tried to do a build. this build was the closest I could get. Master shapeshifter is not as good as naturalist for dps in either form, so it loses out. This has two more points to spend...but no real good place to put them for cat or bear. Alternately you could take the points out of R&T and put them into master shapeshifter, but that's suboptimal for bear threat. You can take a couple points out of savage fury, but you still don't have enough to max out master shapeshifter.

So yeah, if you want to do the best dps as a cat possible, you'll be missing out on some talents for bears. The talents appear to be threat-related, so in a bit of irony you might have a build where you can be a fine mitigation tank but be the worst threat of the 4 tanking classes, but at least be able to do good dps as a cat.

I'm also bothered that they make one of the marquee talents for cats (OoC) in the resto tree. How does it make sense that an essentially required talent for feral dps is in the restoration tree?

The fact that it's called the Restoration tree doesn't really mean much in the end. Every druid places points in the beginning tiers of restoration. It's more of a secondary tree than anything, and every class has to put points in a secondary tree to get what they need. (With the exception of restoration druids oddly enough).

It's not like there are any real wasted points for feral druids there.

Furor should be reworked such that it gave a 100% chance to restore V/W/X/Y/Z rage/energy rather than a 20/40...% chance to restore Z energy so that you could not have to put 5/5 points into it.

What point would it serve? We'd still go futher down the tree for OoC and Naturalist. Unless you really want 70% pushback interruption on heals.

You appear to be thinking strictly in terms of 25 man raids here, I guess? In terms of 10 man raid progression "bring another warlock" will in most cases not be an option, neither is a DPS warrior nor tank warrior something to be assumed always present. Unless Blizzard makes a hash of the encounters or talents and abilities for WotLK, 10 man raids should work decently even if one or two classes aren't in the raid at all so long as you bring classes capable of covering the relevant basic roles- if the 10 man raids do not, if they require specific classes to be present (or are so much harder without specific classes, that it equates to much the same in the common raider mind), they are likely to be failures for the player population as a whole.

From a Blue post...
What did they change to Maim? I don't recall seeing it mentioned before.

Doesn't break until a significant amount of damage is hit (same as fear or roots)

Nice, I hadn't noticed the change. Thanks.

In order for IW to be useful (other than trash disease buff for DKs to eat), you have to have the following condition

1) No Prot warrior available (either through positioning or just not being present) to Thunder Clap
2) No Prot Paladin available (either through positioning or just not being present) to judge
3) No DK available (either through positioning or just not being present) to Icy Touch
4) 0-1 Warlocks and a raid make up that will not forgo CoE

Thats why it is such an easy talent to toss aside, the chances of #3 and #4 happening are extremely slim. And even then if all those conditions are met, you can still have the option of just sticking a DPS warrior in perma battle stance (or stance dancing which ever doesn't hurt their DPS as much) to use Thunder Clap which will give an even bigger swing reduction anyways.

Also it should be noted that unlike the other slow mechanics, there have been several boss fights (granted they are only 5 man) where they are immune to IW anyways.

Can someone verify this is a buff not a slight nerf? When I read it, I assumed that what they were saying is that it was changed so that if it had enough bleed damage going on it would break prematurely, not that it would hold while being hit.