Spec at 70:

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

Not terribly sure about this. Savage Fury and Improved Mangle are both fairly weak in terms of DPS. I'm not sure if Rend and Tear is better though. The numbers really need to be run on FB vs Rip I think. I had one free point that I threw into Infected Wounds for some utility but really this could go into Savage Fury or Imp Mangle I think.

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

This too seems kinda sketchy. Infected wounds can be removed if we have an improved thunderclapping warrior I suppose. I cannot fit the extra point in feral instinct anymore either. At 70, at least improved Demo roar won't be needed but Im kinda worried that at 80 we may need to spec into that.

After making these trees I have some thoughts.
1) Rend and Tear is far too weak for being that low in the tree. The fact I can easily consider skipping it on either build for other things tells me something is wrong.
2) The HUGE constraint of needing to spend 10 talent points for Naturalist (and another 1 for OOC for DPS) in the resto tree is absurd. If OOC is really supposed to be like our combat potency, why is it in the resto tree?
3) Even at 80 I cannot get all the tanking talents. Something is wrong with that. For DPS I can currently fill out a good tree with all the necessary talents, at 80. But they haven't added a bunch of Cat only talents yet.

One of the real talent bloat problems is that there are talents (such as Master Shapeshifter) which are clearly meant to be taken for Feral (since they have Feral components). However, they are in locations that make them strictly sub-par talents that will NEVER be taken if the current bloat remains. I mean removing cookie cutter specs makes sense...unless there is a clearly better route to take. And if the routes are exactly equal whats the point? Its as if they're laying traps for the players who do NOT do the research and see what is the optimal build. Isn't this counter-productive?

About "Pure DPS" you really don't need any tier 2 talents its definitely better to go for Feral Aggression 5/5. Especially in your build where you have 5/5 Rend and Tear instead of Master Shapeshifter.

Does anyone who's switched to the beta recently have a M'uru add tanking set they can compare? Or thoughts about how that tanking might change once 3.0 goes live?

That looks like kind of a hybrid build rather than pure dps. For pure dps, you could drop thick hide, instincts and infected wounds?

You're right about savage fury and imp mangle for dps. They would be useful soloing for dps, but there are lots of better talents for dps.

For group dps, Imp mangle is somewhere between 1/2 energy per second (mangle every 12 seconds) to 0 energy per second (another feral doing mangle). Similarly savage fury is a 20% increase on 0 to 1 moves per 12 seconds (18 with the new glyph).

I still plan to pick up the talents, but for bear. Savage fury is now the most bear threat per talent point you can get. And imp mangle ups threat a lot too.

Rend and Tear is pretty expensive for what you get, especially if you spend more time in bear form. Without the FB portion, it's 10% increased damage to about 30% of your damage, or about 3% more damage for 5 points. There are lots of talents that provide more the .6% dps per point and/or more use while tanking.

The gear we will recieve in WotLK will actually have less armor from what we have been seeing and the reason for this is because they removed crushing blows, thereby rendering the need for HIGH armor far less useful and the cap probably nowhere near 49k (although it may very well be).
WoW-Europe.com Forums -> No Crushing Blows in WotLK! Confirmed!

The problem i see is exactly what is being discussed here...
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Tank Itemization: How Do Druids Compare?

My initial thoughts are it will be better. With talents and the new racial it will be +~7% dodge right off the bat, plus you don't have to worry about def/res at all. I cannot log in at the moment, but when I do I'll post before and after stats if you'd like.

Careful about talking about balance like that. They are in just a bad as shape as ferals are, possibly worse. Its lack of clear direction (PVE wise balance is far worse than feral), terrible itemization and non-resto talents in the resto tree that both specs are forced to take.

On a slightly different topic :

Does Genesis also buff Rip? The wording on that spell is rather odd and Tossk's posts on the beta forum makes it sound like it does.

Sorry, was mostly going by hearsay there - balance has never been a spec thats held any interest for me in 3-4 years on my druid. (Its not just balance, i don't enjoy Warlock, SPriest or Ele shaman much either - just not the ranged nuker type)

Since I can only find the linked screenshots above - does anyone happen to know which boss/mob will dropp it? (beta-wowhead didn't show any results, but maybe I just did something wrong)

Considering Grobbulus dropped "The End of Dreams'', I'd suspect that he could be the one being responsible for dropping feral loot. I hope it's a relative easy boss, so we won't have to wait that long to replace our Wildfury Staff

edit: My bad, due to some stupid filters of mine I missed some feral staves ~ But still, any other information about both staves?

What would you say about this build, guys:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Do those new staves replace the one that was previewed that had the 59 Expertise on it? Or was that a Naxx 10 staff?

I was just wondering why you chose Genesis over Master Shapeshifter. Do you feel that 0.05 * 0.25 = 1.25% more damage really worth more than 4% crit? After talking to Toskk and Astrylian over at Toskk's page, they were informing me that Genesis was one of the more lackluster dps talents.

Those weapons induce a gag reflex for me. I hate how blah all the itemization is getting. Those are the exact same weapons with 1 stat difference between the two. What fun is a game where everything gets reduced to it's simplest common denominator?

What's stopping us from just reducing everything to:

Random Armor of Illidan
Chest
Power: +1000

Random Armor of Kel'Thuzad
Chest
Power: +2000

(Note: To make sure nobody gets left out, I eliminated Cloth, Leather, Mail and Plate armor classes)

Everyone can just have one stat called Power that lets you know exactly how balanced you are compared to everyone else. This way nobody gets confused about trying to twist their class into something that wasn't as designed... blah blah blah... Boring game.

A big part of the appeal of these RPG games is figuring this stuff out. Yeah, it's a PITA sometimes but that's part of the reason we are here... we actually enjoy doing that. Stripping the game down to something so linear as having one piece of armor for each class/spec (or even worse, one piece of armor for 3+ classes/specs) is just bland and boring.

I hope I'm not over the line with my little rant here... I'm sorry if it is. The point I'm really just trying to make is that I feel like Blizzard has been pushing us (as players) into a mold and eventually everything is going to be so 'balanced' that the game's variety will be gone and the life will be sucked out of it.

Why can't classes have a niche anymore? Are things really so bad that we can't figure out ways to adapt to situations when the ideal setup isn't available?

Agreed. Genesis is going to be the worst dps per talent point talent for a feral. Rip, at best, does 30% of overall damage, and this is assuming things like double mangled rips. This means that each talent point has the potential to increase your DPS by 1%*.3 = .3%. This is worse than master shapeshifter and even worse than improved mangle.

I also think that not taking improved Leader of the Pack is a mistake, though perhaps not right now. My suspicion is that this is going to be buffed to increase the likelihood of bringing a feral druid as a cat.

Well nothing is set in stone that is for sure and even more so at this stage. Hell, i'm still having doubts on what to respec when the patch hits.
I will probably lean a bit more to the tank talents as thats pretty much how im seeing myself doing instances when WotLK hits, not to mention that i actually like tanking.

Edit: Well, if ILotP is buffed then i'll reevaluate the situation. Until it is, or if it ever will be, the only way i see that i'll pick it up is knowing that i'll have a warrior TC'ing on the regular raid team. In which case i can drop 2pts from IW into it.

edit: Missed an entire page of thread. Sorry!

edit: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft for raid DPS I think.

* There's no room for ILotP in a DPS build really. The effect has been marginal for a while so I don't think this is a big deal.
* Similarly, there's no room for Infected Wounds. Infected Wounds is a pretty terrible talent, one of the least inspiring TBC additions. Balance has Earth and Moon, so Feral isn't the worst off here, but the only reason you would take Infected Wounds is if you're in a 10-man group lacking the other forms of the debuff.
* Feral Charge could be dropped, but I think it has some valuable utility, and it's only 1 point.
* I don't think any of the current talent points spent contribute less to total DPS than points in Genesis would. If there are useless points in the tree they can be hypothetically replaced with points in Genesis though.

Agreed on thick hide, but cat currently has more room for infected wounds than bear, at least for me. I couldn't do a pure bear build without taking some dps talents, so dropping down to 1/3 IW is what I end up with. With 3/3 IW as a cat, you're providing a nice boost using skills already in your regular rotation. If you've got a bear, he'll end up being your mangle bot so it works out nicely as a division of labor.

For a 10-man set up, I can see where things would change. I was admittedly thinking more 25-man.

Quick question. I know as druids hit isn't the most important stat we can get, but we've always wanted some of it. So, while looking through gear to see if I got enough expertise from gear to drop primal precision I found the following statistics:

I assume

• Naxx-10 tier pieces
• Other pieces as noted
• Slots that aren't yet implemented are marked as N/A
• I couldn't find a second ring that had hit or exp (hence the 0/0)

To find pieces I basically went to the WotLK version of WoW Head and looked at all the purple items added in WotLK.

So, onto my question. We're fine for expertise (going far over the cap without any gems or enchants), but we seem serverely limited on hit. Should we be worried? Or is there some other stat->hit conversion I'm unaware of?

In Naxx10 you will expertise capped both in bear and cat gear. In Naxx25 you will probably be both hit and expertise capped so there is no need to put it on our staves.

Hmm I had forgotten about the scaling on the actual speed/attack speed reduction on IW per talent point. Less than 3 points in here just seems pointless now, which makes it even worse than before (and makes the bloat even worse).

I suspect the reason we're so easily fitting it in the "DPS" spec is because the new DPS talents haven't been released yet (assuming that wasn't just a lie from Blizz).

Also its very odd how those staves are itemized, compared to the Naxx 10 one.

Comparissons between Naxx 25 and Naxx 10:

Both have a Stat at 100
Both have a Stat at 150 (well 151 for one of the Naxx 25 ones)
Naxx 25 has one stat that is 5 points higher (77 vs 72)
Naxx 10 has one stat 8 points higher (59 vs 51)
Naxx 25 has 36 more FAP.

Something doesn't look right there. Besides the FAP, the Naxx 10 and Naxx 25 staff have pretty much the same item budget.

Expertise is more worth than crit rating and agility more than strength in itempoints?

Edit again: They both have the same value and iLvl wheras the staves in the 25 man drops from normal bosses and the DPS one from the 10 man drops from KT.

Nope. All stats and ratings are valued equally, except for stamina which is worth .66 of the rest.