Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion
 

Due to the launch of WotLK, this discussion has been redirected to the new Feral Druid Megathreads:
The bear edition
The cat edition

To remove the clutter in the Feral Druid Megathread created by the new talents and abilities, i've created this separate thread.

Talents
(calculator: WoWhead Druid Talenttree)

Restoration
Improved Mark of the Wild - Reduced to 2 points from 5. (Note: The new rank of MotW has a significant increase in power, 750 armor, 37 stats and 54 resists untalented)

Furor - Now causes you to retain 20 energy (per point) when you shapeshift into catform. Energy continues to increase in casterform, which means that you'll have 100 energy after spending some time in casterform. Additionally, Furor no longer generates energy upon shifting, it only prevents it from disappearing. Therefore, powershifting as a DPS-mechanic is gone. Bear-portion unchanged.

Nature's Focus - Reduced to 3 points from 5, moved to 1st tier from second.

Subtlety - Reduced to 3 points from 5. Now only affects Restoration spells rather than all spells.

*NEW* Master Shapeshifter - (Tier 3, Natural Shapeshifter required) Increases physical damage done in Bear form by 2%/4%, increases critical strike chance in Cat form by 2%/4%.

Omen of Clarity - Now a passive ability rather than a 30 minute self-buff. Proc-chance increased to 3.5ppm, but will no longer proc on instant attacks such as Mangle or Shred.

Feral
Faerie Fire (Feral) - Talent removed. Ability is now baseline. FFF in bearform now deals damage and generates bonus threat.

Feral Instinct - Bearform threat component removed (and added as baseline to bearform itself). Now increases the damage done by Swipe by 10% per point. Cat portion unchanged.

Feral Swiftness - Catform speed-increase now works indoors.

*NEW* Survival Instincts - (Tier 3) Increases maximum health by 30% for 20 seconds. 5 min cooldown. A copy of the Warriors "Last Stand" ability. Usable in Cat and Bear forms.

*NEW* Primal Precision - (Tier 4, Sharpened Claws required) Increases expertise by 5/10. Refunds 40%/80% of the energy cost of finishers that didn't land.

Feral Charge - Moved from tier 3 to tier 5. Now also usable in Cat form.

Brutal Impact - Moved from tier 2 to tier 5. In addition to its previous effects, now also decreases the cooldown on Bash by 15 seconds per point.

Survival of the Fittest - Crit reduction and stat-bonus increased to 2%/4%/6%

*NEW* Natural Reaction - (Tier 6) Increases your dodgechance in bearform by 2%/4%/6% and generates 1/2/3 rage every time you dodge.

Improved Leader of the Pack - You gain 4%/8% of maximum mana whenever Imp LotP procs.

*NEW* Protector of the Pack - (Tier 8, Leader of the Pack required) Increases your attack power in bearform by 2%/4%/6%. Reduces the damage taken while in bearform by 1%/2%/3% per partymember (other than yourself).
Note: This talent will be changed in a post-WotLK patch to remove the party-requirement and give a flat 12% reduction

*NEW* Infected Wounds - (Tier 8) Shred, Maul and Mangle stack a disease (stacks to 2) on the target reducing movement and cast speed by 8%/16%/25% per stack and attackspeed by 3%/6%/10% per stack. Lasts 12 seconds.

Predatory Instincts - No longer affects bearform. AoE avoidance portion changed to 10%/20%/30% less AoE damage taken in catform.

*NEW* King of the Jungle - (Tier 9) Increases damage done in bearform when the Enrage buff is active by 5%/10%/15%. Tiger's Fury now also restores 20/40/60 energy.

*NEW* Improved Mangle - (Tier 9, Mangle required) Reduces the cooldown of Mangle (Bear) by 0.5/1.0/1.5 seconds and the energy cost of Mangle (Cat) by 2/4/6.

*NEW* Rend and Tear - (Tier 10) Increases damage done by Maul and Shred by 4%/8%/12%/16%/20% on bleeding targets. Increases the critical strike chance of Ferocious Bite by 10%/20%/30%/40%/50% on bleeding targets.

*NEW* Berserk - (Tier 11) Reduces energy cost of abilities in catform by 50%. In bearform, Mangle now has no cooldown (other than the GCD) and hits up to 3 targets. Lasts 15 seconds, 3 min cooldown. You can't use Tiger's Fury while Berserk is active.

Abilities

New abilities
Savage Roar (Cat Form) - Finisher that increases AP by 25%. Lasts 6 seconds plus 3 seconds per combo point. 25 energy.

Changed abilities / new ranks
The non-scaling damage component on alot of the Feral abilities has increased significantly. To name two examples, the top rank of Ravage has 1771 bonus damage in WotLK, while the current top rank only has 514. The new top rank of Maul will add 578 damage to your attack versus 176 of the current top rank.

Mangle no longer directly improves the damage done by Shred. Instead, Shred is now affected by any effect that influences bleed damage (including Mangle). This is to ensure that the Arms Warrior talent Trauma, which copies the effect Mangle has on bleeds, can overwrite Mangle without the Feral Druid losing Shred damage.

Maul is now affected by any effect that influences bleed damage.

Tiger's Fury no longer costs energy, but has a 30 second cooldown.

Ferocious Bite: the energy-to-damage conversion now scales with AP.

Rake has had its scaling with AP improved considerably and is now part of DPS rotations.

Lacerate damage-scaling and threat/damage ratio increased.

10 Nov 2008 - Long overdue update with most recent changes. Removed "Preview" from the title

Except that it will be usable in Cat Form ;G

Good point. I had forgotten about that one. There might be more things that have been leaked but that i missed in my topic-start. Don't hesitate to point them out and i'll update the first post. Obviously, it will be updated when more information becomes available as well.

Imp Mangle is confusing to me, mostly for the cooldown reduction it offers on Bearform Mangle.

20% represents 1.2 seconds, which isn't even a full GCD. Currently, we work with a 4 GCD threat cycle (Mangle, 3x lacerate/swipe). Imp Mangle will either allow us to move to a 3 GCD + pause (or latency) cycle.

Personally, I don't have any problem using mangle as soon as it comes up with a 4 GCD rotation, so I don't see how this really helps. Sure, it'll probably add a bit of threat for us, but why wouldn't they make it 25% and give us the full GCD instead of this awkward pause?

For me, the Imp. Mangle change really shines when I'm tanking multiple mobs. I often like to pick up another mob with a taunt and mangle, and hate having to wait for Mangle to come off cooldown inorder to do so.

Doesn't change the retarded .3 second pause though. Literally, it's just dead time in your cycle.

The only thing I find a bit odd is the second to last tier talent being nearly only PvP oriented. While it has some effect in PvE, there are much better PvE talents to take in other trees.

I hadn't considered that; my first impression was that the concept was for hybridized Restoration or Balance specs to be able to spec for some additional survivability in PvP still; meanwhile, a deep Feral Druid would shift some of the top-level talent point investment into mid-level talents by skipping Thick hide, picking up the 10% Armor from a lower-tier talent, thus making each talent point more bang for your buck in a deep Feral build.

Many bosses aren't immune to casting speed reduction effects; think RoS, for example, where during one phase having casting-speed-reduction is pretty well mandatory. Heck, think Magtheridon's adds, even! Letting your Rogues ignore Mind-Numbing Poison in favor of a DPS-increasing one in raids because your Feral OT can stack a 50% casting speed reduction is pretty handy. I wouldn't be ashamed to take it in a Bear build, although I'd skip it in a PvE Cat DPS build and be sure *not* to miss it in a PvP Feral build.

If you have any latency at all it will probably align quite nicely.

Depending on the armor value of level 80 items, it could very well be possible to skip thick hide in favor of Feral Aggression for the additional -AP. It should be on par with Demo shout, which means with talents it will negate CoR. 2/5 will be enough for non-CoR mobs as well, if you want to only invest 2 points.

War Pirate :: Talent tree Druid (full feral aggression)

War Pirate :: Talent tree Druid (2/5 feral aggression, thick hide)

It will be interesting to see if the disease still gets placed on immune mobs - if it does then that might help death knights who seem to have a lot of attacks with bonus damage depending on the number of diseases on a target.

My main problem is there seems to be a lack of scaling for catform- again we'll be loaded up on crit at 80 then as itemisation gets better as ilevels go up with more stats spread across things like armour pen and haste that we just don't get much out of we seem destined to scale poorly.

Some of the new talent ranks are interesting and could have an impact on speccing- demo roar was -408 ap, demo shout was -410: if those values stay the same then we might be expected to take feral aggression.
The level 80 motw seems to be +37 stats- if we're heavily focused on 5-10 mans then imp motw might be worth picking up too- 2 talent points for +14.8 to all stats in a group might well be worthwhile.

Xelopheris, do you no longer think omen of clarity will be useful to ferals at level 80 or did you just forget to include it in your talents? I would think the threat/dps boost of clearcasting would definitely be worth the one talent point it takes out of the feral combat tree.

Granted it may help DKs and Rogues not using mind numbing (as the previous poster said) but its not worth 5 talent points in PvE for that sake, especially considering the bloat of the feral tree. Druids strength was that you can OT and DPS in one spec. This is harder to do now, but still possible if you dont jam 5 talent points into this one. Thing is it doesnt feel right in its place so deep in the tree with only a marginal PvE effect especially for 5 points.

Yeah no added scaling here could be an issue. Then again we haven't seen the new abilities that we're getting which could make up for this. In fact all feral mechanics could be changed for all we know (weapon damage, WF being allowed etc). Further just like Mongoose provides a significant benefit to rogues, new inscriptions may provide more interesting scaling to our abilities. Even a minor removal of energy cost from our already cheap skills provides a significant dps gain. I wouldn't be too worried yet.

Would a non-feral hybrid really dig 43 points into Feral, though?

I think the point is to take both Thick Hide/Reinforced Hide for +20% armor (x6 as opposed to x5.5) for those serious about tanking (or just lacking the gear). Right now at 70, the armor cap vs lvl 73 (bosses) is 35,880. Against a lvl 83 (boss) it'll 49,904! You'll need over 9000 armor to reach that with the current 550% from Thick Hide. Remember that 10% is worth another 50% to a Dire Bear. This'll turn a 1000 armor chest from 5500 armor to 6000. It's even allow us to take AGI-heavy rogue gear more often once we've capped.