Biggest concern about feral right now is back to TBC standards again. We're very close to armor capping, although without the armor from leather pieces we can never cap it without external buffs unlike we are able to in TBC. That at the very least, allows us to scale properly with Ancestral Fortitude and Inspiration (and at a much better rate than the other three tanking classes) In terms of avoidance, I'll probably just gem for dodge on full mitigation gear since we also get rage from dodging (as the other red gem choice will be for Expertise, and we get tons of those thanks to sharing gear with rogues, no sarcasm intended).

I think lowering the armor bonus from 400% to 360%, increase the benefit of agility-dodge bears have by a little will probably solve the problem with "scaling early, not late" problem.

Question, more regarding 3.0 than WotLK release.

In the ideal cat dps spec (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft), assuming the one point in nurturing instinct as pure filler, what will be better to drop at 70? I'm torn between trimming the feral tree down, and losing a lot of the cool features being introduced, or dropping omen of clarity and master shapeshifter just to have fun with deep feral?

Opinions and math would be appreciated on the subject.


Thanks in advance.

Has anyone played around with lootrank for WotLK? I've put together this ranking, but I'm new to it, so really have little idea what I'm doing. Also, this is for pre-Naxx gear only, although because it's only in beta some items from Naxx are showing up.

Loot Rank for WOLTK

It looks correct for some slots, namely helm, neck, back, chest, weapon...but it seems really off for others. I'm a little confused as it seems to be valuing armor pen very high, even though I don't weight it. This can be seen by gear choices and the fact that it values armor pen gems significantly higher than agility gems.

Just curious if anyone has gotten any further on this, or if it's just too buggy to use at the moment.

I would much rather have survival instincts than nurturing instincts for a 1-point filler, even as cat.

I would drop furor at 70, though they have talked about buffing mangle a bit. Still, improved mangle covers the point reduction for mangle. I would also drop natural shapeshifter/master shapeshifter. 4% crit for 5 talent points is decent but not spectacular, and every other talent is either a greater boost or adds more utility overall.

A few pages back it was shown that OoC is the #1 talent for kitty DPS. I would take it over Berserk at 70. And drop MS, IMangle, and NI. Maybe start at lvl 70 with this 0/50/11 build. I'll probably do something similar while leveling.

Also, don't forget Bash for spell interrupts and Frenzied Regeneration is now worth a spot on your bars. For me, this means 6+ more "buttons" I will be pushing while tanking.

There was no real fight that I can think of that a bear could handle better than a warrior or a paladin, and a few that either required a warrior (RoS) required a shield-user (Illidan), or gave a big advantage to one (Archimonde for warriors, Hyjal trash for paladins).

Druids had the advantage of being able to DPS for most of the instance then off-tank where needed (Hyjal trash, Infernals / Doomguys in hyjal, Supremus, Shade of Akama, Mother, Bloodboil, Council, Illidan flames). But none of those fights really favored a druid off-tank in any real way (aside from threat management on Bloodboil, slightly better off-tank strike eating on supremus). The big issue was that there was no fight where you said "Gee, this fight will be a lot easier if our feral druid can make it". If necessary someone could leave the raid and another prot warrior or prot paladin could be brought in for fights. Feral druids just meant you didn't have to swap people out. That's a pretty sad niche to have.

That's my biggest worry too. It seems like threat / damage won't be a major issue anymore, so all the rogue leather we're going to wear won't be terribly meaningful, so it just comes down to 3 stats: health, dodge, armor. Dodge is on diminishing returns, and it sounds like we're going to have a big health lead over other tanks, so that won't be a big issue either, so it's basically down to armor again. I don't want to be anywhere near an armor cap. I want to care when I get an inspiration proc. If I'm going to be wearing rogue leather, make me really want an upgrade... which means either DPS/threat/rage has to matter. Tank DPS rarely matters, it sounds like tank threat is not an issue with new content, and our rage bars are almost always full. There should be some tough decisions like "I hate to give up all the armor on ____ but wow, look at the ____ on that chestpiece!"

Any fight where there were no crushing blows heavily favored a druid. Archimonde favors druids over warriors if you have the priest support, for instance. Azgalor as well. Gurtogg was somewhat favored too. Bears were favored flame tanks as well due to easier crit immunity and better threat, which meant Illidan and Anetheron. More to the point there were no fights where you wouldn't want a druid tank at all, and only a few fights where they couldn't do a specific job. At least in my experience the reasons druids didn't tank was because they could do a better job DPSing when not tanking than any other given tank, so they basically only DPSed.

Sorry though; that's offtopic to this thread.

With the removal of armor on leather gear, the upgrades between tiers are largely down to two things: agility and stamina. Which is definitely a letdown.

Regarding the fifth point in furor, that's a good point, thanks for bringing it up here. I hadn't thought of that.

Edit: I posted it as a suggestion in the beta forums too.

Druids are better tanks even in Sunwell if you don't stack stamina like there's no tomorrow. If you stacked agility while maintaining a reasonable amount of HP (I tank Brutallus with 20-21K life in a hunter group), you'll take less damage due to better avoidance, less spike damage due to armor, and higher threat because of the AP/Crit/Primal fury you have.

I think people stack the hell out of stamina because a lot of people look at wipes due to tank deaths as (well, if you only had 2k more life you would've lived), where as people don't look at boss kills due to tank's avoiding several attacks that would have otherwise killed him. The bottom line is that I think Druids are BETTER tanks than warrior in Sunwell, but some druids have trouble getting a spot over warriors because
1.They gimped themselves (imo) by stacking nothing but stamina
2.Traditional bias that warrior is always better at it

I disagree with the things that are being said here about feral tanking in TBC versus LK. Maybe it's true that we weren't desired as tanks in earlier content (Heroics? Kara?), but by the time I was in T4/T5, I wasn't just the OT who could DPS. I was the preferred MT for many encounters that didn't have some prot warrior gimmick (like Kael'thas and Illidan do). Even for bosses that crushed; my mitigation was so high that crushes typically hit me like normal hits did the plate tanks at the same gear level. My guilds learned all the fights that have healer-interrupting mechanics or big bursts (Tidewalker, Azgalor, Archimonde, Mother, etc.) with me as MT, and gradually switched to me DPSing those encounters as the healers' gear and experience improved. Everything I've read and experienced so far indicates that it may well be the same in LK, with the added bonuses of emergency buttons, daze immunity, and passable multi-target threat. (Edit: beaten. Basically, I agree with what kalbear and david say above.)


Regarding cat DPS:

I am surprised to see a lot of people being okay with their cat DPS in 3.0. I've tried both Berserk and Omen of Clarity cat specs on the PTR, and the theorycraft holds up in my experience; Omen of Clarity is really way, way better. However, even with a full cat spec at 70--0/50/11 without so much as a single talent point in thick hide or survival instincts--I find myself consistently doing 200-300 less sustained DPS than I do on live. Even with full buffs and consumables, raid-wide totems, and a Rip glyph.

Perhaps 50-100 DPS of this might be "user error"--occasional poor timing of Tiger's Fury, or letting a Rip or Mangle drop a bit because I'm not quite used to the new timers and none of the addons for monitoring them work--but there is still a pretty big gap. I guess this is because of the nerf to the agi:crit ratio and the especially the loss of powershifting. Have other heavy powershifters noticed a similar trend between live and PTR/Beta?

For those who have leveled from 70 to 80 on the PTR, do you feel that your personal DPS improved after leveling, relative to other classes? There are more and more posts from both cats and devs saying cat DPS in 3.0 is competitive, that with a cat spec it's better than in TBC, but I am not seeing it so far.

The DPS cycle I have been using is a bit more fluid than the model in Mijae's spreadsheet. Here is what I've been trying:

1. Mangle
2. Shred to 4-5 CP
3. Rip
4. Shred to 4-5 CP, refreshing mangle as needed
5. Ferocious Bite
6. Tiger's Fury
7. Shred/Mangle to 4-5 CP
8. Save energy until Rip is about to drop (in order to roll it over into the next cycle)
9. Rip
10. Repeat

So, basically, I get a FB in every other cycle when TF is about to be off cooldown, and refresh Mangle willy-nilly when it's about to drop. This got me the best results of all the cycles I tried. If I had a bad-luck cycle without crits/OOC procs and couldn't get the FB in while there were still 8 seconds or more left on Rip, then I just Shredded a couple extra times. (I tried it the other way, putting the FB in late and then letting Rip drop for a few seconds after, but that seemed to be lower DPS.)

What cycles have other folk tried at 70? (We've talked quite a bit about cycles to use at 80, but 3.0 will probably be live for a good month at least before LK is available.)

Blizzard has stated that they are tuning classes for lvl 80, not 70. And don't forget our best(?) DPS skill isn't available until lvl 75. Savage Roar.

Is SR really that good? I mean, it's nice to have an ability in that gap, and it will certainly make cat more roguelike-fun, but that good?

Right - paying mind to what the dps cycles are like at 70 compared to what they'll be like at 80 is similar to judging bear tanking without having lacerate early in TBC. The cycle is just not really applicable. It does mean that feral dps is essentially broken at 70 (and thus at 3.02), but that's not that special. I personally found that it was a lot easier to obliterate things when farming thanks to the buffs to FB, but I know that's not all that useful to raid DPS.

This might be the case at 70 (few nerfs you mentioned, loss of powershifting), but the big cat dps boost comes from Savage Roar afaik.

Bear tanking is in far too good of a spot. We need a large armor and HP nerf and the devs know it. Rioht made a thread on the druid forums about it using some numbers that I ran, and I proposed getting rid of armor on all jewelry and trinkets and reducing the HP multiplier on bear form to 15% to compensate. To compensate bears would need some sort of avoidance buff or a new block-esque mechanic to bring them in line with warriors, but right now the fact that we can nearly max out armor *in the first tier of content* is completely overpowered, not to mention our 5-10k hp advantage over the other tank classes.

Yes it's that good.

New build:

So, they felt our mitigation was too high. From 12% down to 8% mitigation. The loss in magical mitigation will hurt, I too would have preferred a drop in armor either via itemization (lowering armor on accessory slots) or a change in Bear Form's armor multiplier.

Buffs to Cat Mangle (will be great for levelling as well) and Rake are nice, however.

edit: I'm curious how they hope to achieve 1/2% for Protector seeing as it's a 3 point talent.

The MMO Champion data for it still says:

.. so its tooltip is still not right. And it's still a 3 point talent. Would love confirmation once people are able to login.

Testing method would be:

In a full party of 5, go into Bear Form with 0/3, then 1/3, then 2/3 and finally 3/3 Protector and see what its "Guardian" buff tooltip says.

vvv edit2: See my edit kal =p

I need to check that out when I log in, because that doesn't actually make sense. So it's only a 2-point talent now?

What part of rake is considered bleed? With the numbers as they are it looks to me like it scales, per energy, better than Shred.

Shred : (2.25*1.3*1.2/14)/42 = 0.00597 ap scaling per energy
Rake: 0.18*1.2/34 = 0.00617 ap scaling per energy

And thats not taking mangle into account on it. I'd assume that means it would need to be put into our cycle which just keeps getting more complicated...which will make DPSing pretty fun.

I would believe all of the rake is bleed, but I admit the tooltip is confusing:
I would also imagine that the main effect of this would be to remove rip entirely from the rotation. If you can keep a rake up and gain CP, you should be able to do something like mangle->rake->shred to 5cp->SR->(rake->shred to 5cp->FB) (with mangle inserted as needed). From earlier indicators the primary reason to do a rip was to keep the bleed debuff up, but if rake can do that instead there is likely no need for rip, at least on lower-armored targets.

The idea of doing no rips and ferocious bites as a cycle is more than a bit odd.

I'd prefer they simply don't have any multiplier on non-leather pieces. This would bring bear armor more in line with all the other classes. Druids would need some other buff to get to where the other tanks are, but that'd allow things like an AP->Armor conversion or AP->Dodge conversion. It would also remove the huge dependency on every non-leather piece having armor and open up itemization choice.

World of Raids words it like this;

Protector of the Pack - Now reduced damage per party member by 1/2/3% instead of a flat 3% for all ranks.

Edit: Bleh that looks like the old tooltip.....

As Kalbear said all of Rake's damage should be bleed damage. I remember using it for solo back in early BC when I was specced 0/31/30 and as far as I recall it hit for a fixed number regardless of target and debuffs (meaning even the front loaded damage ignored armor).