Well if your wasting those 2 talent points as a feral druid in TBC your already doing something wrong. The purpose of this talent was to become slightly more viable in arenas with a healer as your partner, but making this talent didn't help us at all, we need a snare affect to help us in pvp which will be given to us in Lich King (Infected Wounds).

My question is how often are you in Cat form during a raid? More than 85% of the time you are tanking, so wasting 2 talents points on Nurturing instinct would be nonsense.

That being said, wouldn't you agree that replacing this talent with an ability that would allow you to Barkskin while shape shifted. If you think about it, 20% damage would almost be equivalent to receiving 20% more healing, the less damage you take..the less heals you need. Also..this would help your healers if you were taking an abundant amount of damage while tanking in bear form during any given encounter.

Now you see why I think "Feral Barkskin" would be more useful then "Nurturing Instincts".

You should be in cat form... about 20% of Kalecgos, assuming a 3-tank strat; about half of Brut (though you take no damage during it unless burned); either almost all of Felmyst or very little of it, depending on whether you're MTing or not; half of Twins; and all of p2 M'uru unless you're MTing that. (Most of Kil'Jaeden too, from what I understand, although I don't know the fight well enough to comment in any concrete fashion.)

However, the two talents are different things. Obviously 20% less damage received is better than 20% more healing received, but nurturing instinct is a passive effect (100% uptime) whereas barkskin is not. Either effect would be overpowered in bear form. Neither effect would be overpowered in cat form.

I'm not in SWP - but in BT.
I'm in cat on Naj'entus, possibly on Supremus (we run 2 warriors/2 ferals generally, possibly a paladin and use 3 tanks there), Gorefiend, RoS, possibly Gurtogg. MH, definitely Archimonde and other boss fights. Plenty of time in catform.

I still think it's pointless to make it a talent - just allow it to be activated in catform, as is, and yer done - instead of taking out a useful talent.

I would like Barkskin usuable in Bearform (mini Shield Wall thingy), but can see it being a little out of whack. That said, Ferals still use Barkskin on Brutallus or used it to tank Kael'thas.

Wha? Where, exactly, would you spend those points, anyway? Feral Aggression? The build I use currently has more or less every important PvE talent and still has room for Savage Fury, Natural Shapeshifter, Nurturing Instinct and 1/2 Brutal Impact. I guess you could get Primal Tenacity, but after speccing for it for months back when NI was terrible, I have to say I'm wholly unimpressed with it. NI is really one of the better filler talents for those extra points, in my opinion.

The way I have specced, I not once ever used Nurtuting Instinct. Call me crazy but I still see no point in wasting those 2 points in that talent. I think if Nurturing Instinct would allow for 20% more healing recieved in Bear Form it would be more useful than "Feral Barkskin" because obviously 20% more healing would be passive and would be up 100% up the time, but that would be OP.

What else would you spend the points on anyway ?

Savage Fury ? I use Mangle once every 12 seconds. If I'm tanking it doesn't do anything at all anyway.

Anyway, it's getting fairly off-topic here.

Probably easier with regards to normal FF ?

Right now as the wotlk talents stand the feral tree is fairly bloated. I am a feral tank first and foremost and I couldn't even take all the talents that pertained to bear tanking with 71 talent points, much less cat + bear. I realize they may be trying to diversify feral druid's roles of dps and tanking, and I'm okay with that if they make each respectively as good as their counterparts.

The justification for feral druids not being as good of a tank as a warrior or as good of a DPS as a rogue (or warrior for that matter) was because our spec allowed us to hybridize and do both with a single spec. However this will no longer be the case, therefore whichever single role we choose to spec for should be adequately powerful.

Back to the original topic though, in its current state I can't even choose all the talents I'd like for bear tanking, nevermind cat DPS. I seem to come up with 1 extra talent point needed, so I'm unsure which to cut. Obviously the talent tree may change, but for the sake of the argument that it stays the same, which do you suggest I sleight one point in?

Well first off, you'd have to post the build you were considering. Second, unless things change drastically with regards to what effects can be applied to raid bosses (as well as the abilities they preform that you are able to mitigate with talents) I think its safe to say, from a pure PvE perspective, that you can completely ignore Infected Wounds, Brutal Impact, and Primal Tenacity. They are solid PvP talents, but currently any stuns/fears that exist in a raid environment that are worth spending talent points to resist - are unresistable. I also believe its fair to assume we won't be able to apply infected wounds to (or stun) raid bosses in WotLK.

If things stay as they are, my talent selection for raiding at 80 will look like this. The only things I've given up from my current spec are 2 points in Savage Fury, 1 point in Imp. LotP, and 2 filler points in Nurturing Instinct (which, in my opinion, is far from a worthless talent for raiding if you spend a decent amount of time in cat). Barring any change which would make rake worth keeping up as a significant source of damage in-and-of itself, Savage Fury is one more example of something you would take because no better options exist. A talent which gives a 20% damage increase to an ability [Mangle(cat)] we aim to use as little as possible, seems to be an easy place to free up 2 points.

Finally, it doesn't seem too terrible dropping 1 point out of Imp. LotP; most of the time the healing it provides is nothing more than overheal anyway. Don't get me wrong, it's a great source of free healing and does help in some situations to a noticable degree, but even if the benefit was questionable at best I'm not sure theres a better place to spend that last single point.

Given the current talent trees, I can't see how we have any hard choices to make when it comes to raid tanking/dps. If anything I wish they would reduce Naturalist to a 3/3 talent with the same bonus (or hell, even scrap the HT aspect of it) since we're the only ones really taking it, and give us 2 more points to spend elsewhere, especially if Rake becomes a viable source of damage.

The only direct-dps talents that you're missing there are Feral Aggression and Savage Fury; my back-of-the-envelope calculations* suggest that FA is worth less than 1% per point if we're using Ferocious Bite, while SF is worth between 2% and 3% per point if we're using Rake, about half that if we're not.

If rotations don't change it's just some damage off Mangle, but the worst case, that's 11%, which would be a distinct difference between cat-spec and bear-spec druids. In that event, it might be worth pulling points out of iLotP and something else to fill out at least Savage Fury, if not both.

* Assuming FB is worth about the same percentage of our damage as rip is now, Mangle stays the same, Rake is worth about the same as a Shred, and then rounding up.

new "inside" info on the pre-liminary desc for the dire cat form, that has been leaked on wiki.info druid forum. Do note that it is a preliminary detail so specifics will be fine tuned over time, but feral druids are been buffed in dps for cat form so they scale as good as any class at end game and so their dps in kitty form & gear matches any melee dpser rather than lags behind by 10% or more which is reported currently in live.

Hmm, the preliminary Dire Cat form seems rather overpowered on first impressions. From a PvP perspective, we'd be looking at an un CC-able mutilate-shadowstep rogue in mail, with 40% dodge, moving at 145% speed and able to output reasonable heals in a pinch.

I'm having a hard time believing it - especially since there doesn't seem to have been an alpha update yet.

I will say though, if this is true, we'd better buy ourselves a boat to stay afloat on all the rogue/warrior tears flooding the officials.

Uh increases the feral attack power contribution of your weapon by 100%? Thats ridiculous. Applying that to my current Forest Lord staff would be as if I was wielding a 214 dps weapon. Feral AP is a greater % of our weapon damage than our base damage is now.

Unless, feral attack power is not applied at all to you if you don't have a qualifier like this (in which case this statement just allows the feral ap to "work").

I appreciate the attempt to be fair to other classes, but can we at least wait to try things out before we start calling feral buffs overpowered?

I'd be interested to see how they're handling the idea of an off-hand in forms. Will it be a different coefficient of a FAP staff, or (unlikely) are they considering off-hand itemization for ferals? The chance to have a form that can move more fluidly between casting and DPS does sound pretty good, though.

But with a gouge that eats all your CPs, have to shift out to do your cast-time blind, no Cheat Death, no Cloak of Shadows, no Mace Stun, no Kick, and no Wound Poison. You'll move better than a rogue, but won't have the control.

Dire Cat form was announced during the WWI class panels last week and tooltip was posted by players with access to the alpha.

The wiki poster who posted the tooltip claimed to have inside information and that Dire Cat Form is in the conceptual stage and not, in fact, anywhere in the alpha files.

I read similar in a few places, perhaps they were all based on the same possible [mis]information. If that is the case, it probably should not be discussed here as I think that puts it against the forum rules.

WotLK, Leaks, and You

What?

Rogues are dealing 2600dps. A 15% increase for Druids would still put them at below Enhancement Shaman levels (2070dps vs 2100dps for shaman)

I've got a question regarding feral dps, Now that Sunwell has arrived, is it better to use 2 Tier4 and 4 Tier6 than MH/BT/Sunwell random epics?

It's answered a couple of dozen times in the feral megathread (the place that isn't discussing WotLK), but the consensus was that, unless you were farming Kil'Jaeden were able to take every piece of DPS leather, you used 2t4/4t6, and if you did take every piece, you gained something like 50 dps.