I think the feral attack power is more of a technical limitation than anything else. To simply remove that, they'd have to make it so the weapon dictates your swing speed and they want to keep the current attack speeds for cat and bear as this keeps it much simpler to balance. I suppose they could do a workaround and somehow let you get advantage of weapon dps while keeping your current swing speed, but that's effectively identical to feral attack power (actually inferior factoring in savage roar, unleashed rage, etc).

The simplest and most logical thing to do would be to simply remove moonkin from feral ap since mana from melee in moonkin form is gone, and just have two handed maces with 150 dps and 1400 feral attack power or whatever item level dictates. It really wouldn't cause any balance problems. Nobody is going to be scared of a druid in caster form autoattacking. It would ensure a better selection of tank itemization for both death knights and ferals. You could eliminate the 'one weapon per instance if you're lucky' crap that happens now.

If this makes maces overrepresented they could always give druids two handed axes again. They had them in the original beta for WoW. Or polearms. Whatever would feel the least weird I guess.

Polearms and spears used to be separate weapons back in the day and druids could only use spears. They removed spears from the game and unified those two weapon classes under polearms since they had so few of either. Forgot if there were any other classes that could also only use spears.

If I was setting up itemization, I'd do the 150dps/1400FAP change, but I'd also make the tanking weapons 2h Maces (to share with DKs) and the DPS weapons staffs (to share with Hunters for statsticks), and leave 2h Axes/Swords for Warriors/Retadins/DK DPS.

It's far simpler than that.
150 dps weapon --> 150 damage per second * 1 second per swing = 150 damage per swing in cat form.
150 dps weapon --> 150 damage per second * 2.5 seconds per swing = 375 damage per swing in bear form.

They would probably want to remove the base feral damage when we have a weapon equipped. Or they could choose to leave it since any of our AP scaling (not dmg, but ap) moves lose benefits like unleashed rage or savage roar benefits.

It would probably less work to change FAP to DPS than to continue to worry about FAP items. Assuming they're willing to do some minor tweaks to AP scaling and benefits from base feral damage, the only reason to keep FAP is to limit the weapons we can use.

I guess there could be some boomkin issues due to low weapon damage on caster staffs. It wouldn't be hard to balance that with a moonkin form multiplier. It seems like it's easier to adjust boomkin weapon damage than continue to balance them around different caster staffs, dps weapons, and FAP weapons at the same time. This is especially true since moonkins very seldom meleekin during groups/raids anyway and seldom swap to FAP weapons in my experience.

Latest beta patch has the following changes:

They keep tweaking Ferocious Bite, but they are going to have to make the numbers really ridiculous to tempt us into using it .. if it continues consuming all energy after use.

The Swipe change is nice, but I'm afraid they might add a cooldown to it. It's now vastly superior to Thunder Clap, which just had its cooldown increased from 4 secs to 6 secs. Or maybe the buff is to compensate for the new Warrior AoE move.

The Savage Roar buff simply looks like a minor upwards tweak.

Increasing the duration by ~60% seems a bit more than minor to me. That allows for a lot more flexibility in cycles, am I wrong?

I think those changes are pretty great.

The extra duration on Savage Roar is hardly a minor upwards tweak. Getting an extra 13 seconds on it gives you 13 extra GCDs to spend using Mangle, Shred, and Rip while gaining the benefit of Savage Roar, not to mention you won't have to refresh it as often.

The increase to AP is interesting given that nobody has had a chance to actually use the kind of level 80 gear that would scale best with it (besides Blizzard's own team) but I think we'll see some interesting results as people start reporting their performance in level 80 dungeons and gear. Obviously with the lack of FAP we'll have roughly the same amount of AP as Rogues, but while their damage will scale with their weapons, ours will scale with Savage Roar.

And the Swipe change is just great. There won't be a cooldown on it (I think it's rather silly to even worry about such a possibility) because that would completely break Druid tanking. My best guess, not being in the beta, is that we'll be seeing a lot of 4-pulls in instances and it'll be up to the various tanks to decide whether they want to use CC or if they're comfortable with their healing and just tank everything.

FAP isn't going away.

We were discussing that it could potentially happen, but there has been no indication that this is their intention.

Wow. I can only hope that is true but it smells like a bug related to us being able to use consumables in feral forms.
It sure would be a great PvP buff since most shifting is done to escape snares rather than to gain an extra 40 energy after a Ferocious Bite.

No, you're not wrong at all, it's more than a minor tweak for sure. Considering current cycle lengths (~12 secs), it would allow 2 Rips per SR with roughly 62-64% Rip uptime, and 90%+ SR uptime .. with the possibility of aligning SR downtime with energy queuing.

Looks like it's here to stay!

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...a_weapons2.jpg

We'll be gemming for strength, according to Blizzard.
It shouldn't be too big of a problem since Rogue gear comes with +AP anyway which will supplement the PvP gear.

Also of note is that the druid PVP set is identical to the rogue PVP set (except set bonuses, and the gloves having a deadly throw bonus vs no bonus on ours) The no bonus likely due to not figuring out a suitable replacement since they added our prior glove bonus to maim by default.

Also there is no "Druid melee" 3 piece (at least not yet)

I would have thought with the talk of us being too agi based, at least our set itemised pieces would have strength rather than AP (SoTF alone would encourage this approach)

The "rogue" 3-pc is Classes: Druid, Rogue - its ours too

Didn't one of the blues indicate that STR as a stat was going to be largely for plate classes - given that they changed it to be worth much less for enh shaman too. It was indicated that rogues would pretty much have to gem Hit (to avoid gear having so much hit that we went way over cap) and we would be free to gem AP/Str or whatever - with STR being the obvious AP socket for us due to SotF and Kings

No bonus armour on the feral pvp stuff - so i'd say thats a pretty strong indication to those saying "it will show up on teir sets" that it really, really won't and that our feral teir set will be the rogue one with different set bonuses.

I don't see intellect on arena druid stuff...
According to me, it's a very bad thing to remove intellect because it's nice to have 10k ap but if we can't demorph...

Seems like Rampage(warrior) is the same buff as LoTP now, though it has shorter range but affects raid members.
I'm fairly certain that we will see the raid-wide part of the buff apply to LoTP too, once they get to druids.

As for removing FAP, the simple solution would be to just add in an "adds your weapon dps * X to your ap while shifted" -effect to bear and cat form, then remove all the FAP on weapons, and restoring their dps to the appropriate value for their Ilvl. You would also need to update Predatory strikes, ofcourse.

I'm still curious about if they plan on going back and removing +armor on TBC items, or just ramp up both "base armor" and the armor cap, to make sunwell gear have less armor than WLK items.

I can't wait to see the next druid pass. I suspect we'll have a pretty drastic tree change, similar to the last hunter or warrior changes.

Given no mana on our gear, I'm guessing they'll change HotW. +20% of 0 is not worthwhile. It could give int or even mp5 based on str/agi/ap.

Wow, that is simply amazing for feral pvp. One of the weaknesses of feral pvp was having to completely stop dps and waste energy to do any CC or healing. This would be a fantastic change.

Also, this would significantly buff powershifting, with the only limitation being our mana!

Fingers crossed this isn't a bug.

Just had another thought: Does this also work for Bear Form rage? It would be nice to retain rage after shifting out and it would then also allow rapid rage generation via bear-powershifting too.

That'd be kind of hilarious. Starting every pull by spamming bear 10 times for a full rage bar.

Confirmed, this is happening for me too. Lets hope this is intended, that's a huge buff for PvP, and all powershifting. And it makes Powershifting really easy to model; each powershift is just a spell that costs X mana, 1.5sec GCD, and -40 energy cost.

EDIT: Important note, it does not work that way for Bear rage. That says to me that it's not just an accidental side-effect of enabling items in forms or something.

If you shift 2 times in succession, do you end up with 100 energy? (2 seconds = 20 energy, 2 shifts = 2 seconds = 80 energy).

Powershifting takes 1.5sec, not 1sec, but yes, you end up with 100 energy (plus 20 wasted, 10 from being at a minimum of 10 when you powershift and 10 from getting too much from powershifting)