Yes, but you'll accumulate energy out of catform, meaning that if you shift out to brez someone and throw a heal, you won't have lost any energy, you'll be at full energy when you shift back in.

If you don't care about that, I guess you could use just Intensity to get the rage for pulls, freeing room to take improved MotW and healing pushback reduction, but keeping 100% energy will be nice for a fair number of emergency situations, such as clearing snares in arena.

I've seen reports of beta testers of Savage Roar not affecting bear form. That would break this little combo, sadly.

Caster/Moonfire/Cat

?

No talents, no +spell, that is about 850 DPS at 80. If that is more than kitty white damage it is another way to convert mana to DPS when you are at zero energy.

Yeah, what I proposed is based on three conditionals:
1) Enough reserve mana is maintained to innervate + shift or brez + shift,
2) Threat from going to bear doesn't lower potential dps threshold,
3) Enraged white + yellow bear attacks > white cat attacks + ooc procs for the same duration.

For napkin math on that last point, in a 5 sec interval bAP being bear AP and cAP being cat AP, a bear should be able to get off 3 white attacks and 2 mangles, giving you 1.15*(3*2.5*bAP/14 + 2*2.5*1.2*1.15*bAP/14) = 1.183*bAP. Cat white attacks in that time would be 5*1*cAP/14*1.4 = 0.5*cAP. An ooc proc would change it to 1.15*(2*2.5 + 1*2.5*1.2*1.3 +2*2.5*1.2*1.15)*bAP/14 = 1.298*bAP and (5*1 + 2.25*1.3)*cAP/14*1.4 = 0.793*cAP. So cAP:bAP ratio should be about 2.366 after AGI and HotW w/out an ooc proc and 1.637 w/ a proc. If say the ooc scenario happens 5% of the time, then the average cAP:bAP ratio should be somewhere like 2.33. HotW gives cAP 10% more AP scaling, so we're looking at a ratio of around 2.118. AGI contributed AP would have to be around 50% of cAP. In terms of itemization, for every 1.166 AP we'd need 1 AGI and for every STR we'd need 2 AGI to meet this criteria. Ultimately, it depends on what the gear looks like to see whether this mechanic would net a benefit or not.

I didn't factor in potentially dropping 2 white attacks worth of Savage Roar when going back into cat afterwards and master shapeshifter and rend and tear talents aren't added into the analysis, so this isn't all that accurate. Haste probably makes ooc procs work a little differently too. I wonder though, even if Savage Roar isn't applying to bear, is it working like Dash in that if you shift back into cat while the duration should still be up, does the buff remain?

As for the moonfire suggestion, it's possibly a benefit if your cat form white attacks are below 800ish on average after nomalizing hits and crits, as the comparison is between the damage per cast time of moonfire and the cat opportunity cost of 1.5 attacks. Max rank moonfire with full hit and no crit is 1241 avg dmg. There are raid debuffs that'll up this, but moonfire will basically only scale a minor degree with crit on gear, while cat white attacks will benefit from ap, moreso from crit, expertise and armor pen (assuming hit capped on both melee and spells and that haste doesn't affect opportunity cost since gcd and swing speed are sped up equivalently).

That's a nice change, but I would argue that the energy portion should really be baked in to cat form anyway. Without powershifting furor remains a convenience/leveling/pvp talent, and at five talent points, a exorbitantly expensive one. Of course the real kicker is that feral druids are effectively forced to take it.

New build, new talents: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Druid -> Talent Calculator

Natural Reaction
Increase your chance to dodge by 2/4/6% in bearform and gain 1/2/3 rage when you dodge in bearform.

Mother Bear
Increases the attack power bonus of Bear form by 20/40/60% and for each friendly player in your party, reduces damage taken by 1/2/3%.

Some nice tanking talents. Can still fit almost everything needed to tank/dps in (though I had to go down to 3/5 Predatory Instincts...or possibly 2/5 and 2/3 Infected wounds). Predatory instincts is really looking like the easiest place to remove points. The 15% aoe "resistance" is swingy and the crit damage bonus, while nice is not terribly large. Especially since our agi:crit ratio is getting nerfed hard and due to leveling our crit will be significantly lower at 80. Granted this is easier because natural shapeshifter is significantly weaker since furor doesn't allow powershifting anymore. Its too expensive to try and get to master shapeshifter IMO.

Wow... Mother Bear is pretty huge. Guess they couldn't think of anything different than a defensive stance mechanic though. These new talents definitely increase the split between full bear and cat specs even more. It's odd they give us bear only talents, but not cat-only alternatives though (other than NI).

On a different note, wth is going on in the balance tree? What happened to Nature's Grasp and Control of Nature? They've really buffed PvE restos taking balance talents. Seems like they're nerfing PvP though.

Edit: The change to 100 energy on Furor is missing also. Is that a bug or was that blue post wrong?

I think it's safe to say that when spells and talents refer to "party members" they include yourself.

For example, look at Gift of the Wild's tooltip.
If you select yourself and cast it, it gives GotW to your entire party including yourself.

Same thing with Arcane Brilliance.
Again, casting it on yourself buffs yourself and your party.

It seems like many of the recently changed / announced changes talents (Furor, Improved Faerie Fire, Earth and Moon) either have old functionalities or wrong tooltips on their calculator).

Both welcome, but...

Neither scale our mitigation/avoidance with gear improvements. They help as much at 'ding 80' as full epics. Is this going to be another 'bears are so OP'd' at KZ level and then 'bears are good tanks' at BT level?

(Well, dodge is progressively better, so I guess a 'more dodge' talent does sorta get 'more better' with even more dodge? Not enough to be called survivability scaling IMO).

(The rage/dps/threat does scale with gear).

No tank scaling from additional stats. Our mitigation/avoidance still scales entirely on armor (currently not a 'choice' on any of our leather pieces) and agi (which isn't likely to be found on pieces with high armor?) and dodge rating. That's it. The 3 other tanks scale on a much broader range of stats. I worry we'll be wishing high armor/agi leather existed end game or rings/cloaks/etc without so much defense, parry, block or even str.

The resto tree still needs a revamp. We have to take 5 talent points that are almost useless outside of pvp or soloing (furor), to get to necessary talents like naturalist and omen. Arguably we have to take 8 pvp points if you consider master shapeshifter necessary in pve. Furor should go deeper and the other talents move down so that we don't waste so many talent points in the resto tree. I don't see a tank build that would get master shapeshifter though. Even without it, I'd have to drop something like expertise for imp LotP?

Mother bear ~ defensive stance.

Armor is likely to be about the same as warriors/paladins (I think) in a combo of their off pieces and our leather?

So to be similar damage taken our dodge (10% from talents, 5% bonus + the rest?) + miss (almost 0) needs to reduce our damage taken about the same as the other tanks' parry + miss + block + dodge?

I still think we should care about some other stat on our gear to scale correctly, even if it means less value elsewhere.

He posted that he changed it today, there's no way that can make it into a build going live now. We'll probably see it in the next push, hopefully Furor will be cut to 3 points by then too, it really is too expensive for what it's worth now.

Edit: You probably meant the calculator, in which case it is just a typo or missed change I imagine.

Well, they scale in odd ways.

We all know by now that dodge has 'improving returns' - the more you have, the more valuable it is.

For Mother Bear, it is an odd sort of scaling.

For the same boss, as your armor increases (and it will increase with each tier of gear, just not as much as it does today), 3% damage reduction is actually less effective. But...bosses in Sunwell hit a lot harder than bosses in SSC used to and while that isn't directly related to gear level it is indirectly related (i.e., 3% damage reduction against Brutallaus' hits is a hell of a lot more damage reduction than 3% against an SSC boss was). In other words, that 3% damage reduction is likely to be just as helpful at the last raid instances as it was at the first. That's scaling. It doesn't become 'less effective'.

Must be a typo considering the 10% int in Moonkin form is in.

Mother Bear looks like a nice talent, althought I am not quite certain as to what counts as bonus attack power in Direbear form? But 12% damage reduction (in a 5 man group) for a 3 point talent is definately huge.

Natural reaction: well as like most people who posted above me, the first thing that came to mind: flat increase = bad (and yes I apreciate that doge scales with itself) I think a 6% agility increase would be a better solution (although that may go against their cat - bear speration policy). one thing that people seem to be forgetting though when talking about our scalability is that we will (probably) no longer reach the armor cap after T7 content, so as we progress we will get increased mitigation from armor in WotLK, granted it has diminishing returns, but better than 0.

One thing I do find odd about the talent changes in this new build is that they worked on bear rather than cat. I was under the impression that tanks would be addressed last and that they were currently tuning dps classes/specs. Well maybe this was just an appetizer for things to come.

In terms of surivability, armor does not have diminishing returns.

The changes are fantastic, but the feral tree really looks extremely bloated right now. I'm guessing they are creating 2 trees within the same tree?

As it is right now, I can't even find a 55 point talent build for feral tree that gets me everything I want even just as a tank (other 16 points being in resto for OoC and Master Shapeshifter)

Maybe we'll see a talent merge soon, since it's pretty clear they just threw these talents at us for more bear-focused builds.

I'd say the attack power on Dire Bear Form is meant. I don't think all attack power we have as bears is going to be increased by 60%, as this would be, well, kinda ridiculous.

Dire Bear Form has a flat Attack Power bonus (120 AP at lvl 40, 210 AP at lvl 70, see Dire Bear Form - Spell - World of Warcraft). This talent would make that 336 at lvl 70.

I like the talents. I think my problem with them is that they don't address how we scale in gear that is not well suited to bears. There's nothing in these talents that make me want to wear WotLK rogue gear over something like T6.

Maybe that's going to be done with a non-talent mechanic. I think I assumed we would get the 'rogue and tank str/defense gear is good for you because...' changes from talents. Who knows, maybe the newest patch notes will say something like 'damage in bear form is decreased by n% of your ap'?

Nature's Grasp is becoming a baseline ability.
WoW Forums -> Talent Trees Have Been Changed

As for Mother Bear, I have zero idea why they even bothered to make it based on the number of party members. Why don't they just put it as a flat 12-15% and be done with it? It's borderline downs.

Making Mother Bear scale with party size would make it less powerful for 2v2 and 3v3 Arena's. Explicit PvP scaling.

Because bears and prot warriors were ready to take over PVP, correct?

I really wish they'd communicate the reasons they use for their changes. As it is, I'm probably going to be "soloing" elite quests in Northrend by inviting 4 random people to group up with.