I think I'm going this route

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The vital bear talents skipped are Feral Aggression (I don't think FB, despite having RnT, will pass Rip anytime soon. We shall see though), and Infected Wounds for Boss tanking. The structure of my guild pretty much will have a Warrior MT, and we do have all 4 sorts of tanks. In comparison, Infected Wounds is the weakest version of them all talent-wise, considering it needs to be stacked and can actually be skipped in the talent tree, this also allows me to switch to a DPS role on fights with just 1 tank while only missing out on 2/2(5/2?) Master Shapeshifter for 4% crit, and the 15% bonus to FB.

I thought if I shared some of my experiences on beta it might help people either choose specs, or have an idea on the direction ferals are heading.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is the build I currently am on beta, basically went for a most of the time tank sometimes dps build. I have 254 hit and 16 (incl talents) expertise (-4% dodge/parry) about 35% dodge about 21k armor, 33.5k hp raid buffed. No consumables.

I MT'd Sartharian today (screenshot http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/m...108_011059.jpg), and have also tanked Spider wing of Naxx. On Maexxna I got relegated to dps duty despite wanting to give tanking it a go - "because you don't have a shieldwall". I felt a little bit clumsy dpsing to be honest, probably just because im used to the rotation on live. It 'seemed' like pretty decent dps, but I dont have any working mods on my beta account to see.

The rotation I liked to use was enrage/berserk at pull. This did 2 things 1) Gave me a nice threatlead from spamming mangle, and 2) allowed me to white hit instead of maul to get a nice rage build up. From then onwards, the rotation was exactly as now: Mangle every cooldown (i have imp talent tho), lacerate inbetween. The main thing that was very very noticable when tanking was that I was permanently full of rage, even using maul every single swing. It wasnt from primal fury - I have about the same crit in bearform as on live. Not sure if that's because I undergear it and i was getting hit harder, or because of the natural reaction talent or both. I assume as gear improves, natural reaction talent will give more rage as would primal fury. I might try swapping out my Ferocity talent for Feral Agression, don't really need the rage discount and didnt have a warrior with me to demo shout.

Now that R & T has gone up to 20% , can someone please run the numbers on it for cat builds? It seemed like previously it was being skipped for both bear and cat builds. I'd also like to know what ya drop to pick it up :P

The question isn't just whether or not FB will be better dps than rip rotations. It's 'is the increase in dps I see going speccing for FB worth more than spending those talents elsewhere?' For most, maxing FB means takeing at least 5 points you didn't intend to take. For some it means more than that (weren't planning to take RnT?)

What else can you get for your talent points? You're going to give something up for that extra damage. Is 5% (or 10, or 15 or ?) worth:

Giving up your ability to main tank bosses (mother bear, reaction)?
Giving up free heals for the raid (iltop)?
15% more damage from AEs (instincts)?
Getting parried less as a bear (precision)?
Etc.

If you mostly solo and pvp, maybe it is. If you don't even have a bear button, sure it is. But if it ends up being a minor dps increase, there's a good chance it's still not worth it to max FB talents over just doing rip rotations for most of us.

In my decision is was easy to simply swap Ferocity for FA.

Ya, I hadn't heard a lot of reports of endless rage until now. In the past, at least on non-bosses, the rage saved on swipe, mangle and maul alone made ferocity the clear winner. On a mangle, swipe, swipe rotation that's over 3 rage per second saved. Throw in some mauls and it's even more.

But if rage is always inn abundance, it might mean a change in druid conventional wisdom for the first tier?


Manapaws: on beta, how is threat compared to dps classes? On trash? On bosses? I ask because I find myself comparing the threat provided by talents like shapeshifter, rend and tear, improved mangle, etc. If we're in no danger of losing threat, though, it's probably more important to ask what provides more survivability in bear or dps in cat.

Yeah obviously it will take more testing, but the Natural Reaction talent seems like a really good Rage "battery".

Since WWS doesn't want to parse my LK Beta combat logs I am going to try out WoWCardioRaid and try to get some parses on trash and maybe a LK 5 man boss if the lag ever settles down.

Honestly, I've not been giving a damm about compromise builds on the beta - Been going full bear by dropping everything into the feral tree except for the five points for furor or full cat builds, and no, you cant drop ferocity - in a maximal mitigation build, rage is limited. The nice thing about going "I dont really care about anything but bear" when speccing is that you can be wholly self sufficient for tanking debuffs, which really does matter a lot for heroics/10 mans

TLDR: 5/5 feral aggression is better than 5/5 naturalist for bear - tough they really ought to put the bear discounts on the same talent as the improved roar and the cat discounts on the same talent as the improved bite

Yeah right

Look at those PTR changes on heavy clefthoof set





Blizz changed armor bonus into dodge rating while defense is still there? I mean WTF. Why do feral druids even have a talent to remove defense from feral tanking itemization, then?

Random blue of the Beast post 3.x WILL BE better for tanking that this.

I've been wondering if there's is a reason why in the world our Naxx Tier sets have AP instead of strength? I mean honestly it just isn't making any since to me. Am I just missing something and being completely clueless?

I'm guessing it has to do with keeping tier and non-tier pieces similar for us. If they designed our tier set "perfectly", then all of a sudden all non-tier leather rogue pieces would be useless unless it had a lot higher item level.

It kinda sucks, but also makes sense. If they've made the decision that we're to use rogue gear, they also have to give our feral druid tier pieces rogue stats.

GC stated in respose to the question of STR instead of AP something close to:

If we put STR on druid only leather it becomes strictly better than leather shared with rogues and will be the only items sought after by druids. Leaving druids in the current position of only wanting Tx pieces out of each raid and none of the intermediate upgrades.

They just should convert all existing AP to Strenght and adjust classes conversion instead of adding another stat that does exactly the same thing but in green.

But if they gave us less STR (so it becomes the same with kings) they could have given us some INT on our tier sets.
68+35+4 = 107% base mana to cast rebirth, innervate and go back to cat form. A tiny bit of INT would help.

True but after AI and kings and mark you should be at at least 130-140% of your base mana even if you have 0 int from gear. I recall they talked about a mana regen component on ILOTP for the feral when it procs although I dont remember if they put it in yet or not. been testing boomkin the last couple days I'll have to go back feral and play around agian.

Yes it is in, but it's extremely difficult to fit ilotp talents into a pve build.

... The defense was there because those items were designed during TBC where you can't get immunity from talents? Why are you expecting a top polish job on retroactive itemization when there's still so much work to be done on WotLK itemization?

Obviously leatherworking crafted items in WotLK are going to be good for tanking in WotLK. Case in point: trollwoven - Wowhead Search

Sure, the Sta:Agi ratio could be higher, but they're excellent upgrades over anything in TBC.

Yes. Boundless Ambition drops off KT: Amulets - Items - World of Warcraft

Prone to RNG, but hey, you give and you take. At least you won't have to decide between a DPS neck and a tanking neck for the quest reward. :P

Edit: BTW, we're not getting anywhere near 2% dodge with 40-odd agility at 80. That screenshot is misleading.

As i mentioned previous, the necks/rings have very little if any agility. I'm almost curious if it'll be worth taking the dps option in most cases. Most of it has fairly decent stamina, and agility is pretty win for us - even with the ratio nerfs.

Am i out of my mind here, or is that the direction we're heading?

I'm not sure if that's a raid or heroic, but I'm curious if guilds will allow druids to loot raid items with defense over those who can get more use from it?

edit: spelling.

The way I see it, tanking itemization for druids in wotlk is going to be pretty convoluted, but workable.

Your main sources of income are as such:

Body slots - Stam/Agi, secondary threat i.e. crit/haste/expertise
Non-body slots - Armor/avoidance, secondary threat i.e. strength

You'll be crazy not to load up on armor on the non-body slots regardless what other stats are on them, as they're going to make up *a much more significant chunk of our total armor* compared to TBC. This is from two factors: No more bonus armor on body slot items, and the abundance non-body slot armor items, i.e. introduction of armor necks, and a plethora of armor trinkets (i.e. you can have two, instead of just BoT in TBC)

Editedit:
It's from Kel'thuzad 25, which is equivalent to Gruul if Gruul were the endboss of an introductory 25-man raiding zone. Druids have the fallback option of the JC neck - Titanium Earthguard Chain.

Also turn that idea on its head - would guilds allow non-druids to loot raid items with armor over druids who gain 5x as much out of it? Also just as important to note is that while our agility ratios have been nerfed out of orbit to something more reasonable, we still gain a shitload more out of straight stam than the other tanks. Blizzard has to take that into account when designing items.

I guess who loots it will really depend who's tanking more often. Remember: The current design paradigm regardless of current situation/beta build is for all 4 tanking classes to be able to MT. This is way, way, different from the design paradigm in TBC.

Deathknights will probably want any jewelery with armor on it as well.

The bottom line is, as long as we don't see something that has both armor and block rating on it, I'm going to assume Blizzard knows what they're doing. Or at least if the current build is failing, what they want to do.

With both the Malygos-10 and Malygos-25 quest reward necks being pure Paladin/Warrior fodder, it's still midly concerning. You'd expect the quest rewards to be the most generic items of the lot, yet they seem to be about as specialized as they could be. Warriors and Paladins have use for Armor, as influenced by design choices for items such as [Ring of Hardened Resolve] - you'd expect one of those two rewards to be at least useful to all 4 tanks, if not favoritized.