[Cat] Optional talents (that aren't optional) for cats

While Cataclysm's kept me tons of busy, it's been a fun busy. I love the new heroics and their difficulty level and requirements for encounter awareness and ability use. I love the look of most of them as well. The fights are interesting and fairly hard, and most importantly hugely unforgiving. Trash is hard and needs to be respected. Kill orders need to be followed. CC should be used, even creatively at times.

And normal modes of raiding have gone back to being very interesting in design and scope. Halfus, Maloriak, Theralon and Valiona, Omnitron, Magmaw - all have multiple phases and roles and a lot of movement and raid awareness. They really reward a good druid who can utilize all of their abilities and knows what to do and when to do it. I was very ready to bash Cataclysm's design and the 'coolness' of heroic modes compared to Ulduar, but so far the encounters are really great.

Part of the design for Cataclysm was to give everyone a chance to pick talents that were 'fun' or 'interesting' but didn't specifically boost DPS, because any DPS class that picked a non-DPS talent was obviously wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. In any given build for a class/spec, this means (in theory) that you have 5 or so talent points kicking around that can be used for a preferential talent or two but you don't really 'need' in order to play well.

And today, I'm going to put that to the dirty, horrible lie that it is.

The basic cat build is something like this: the 0/31/6 build with 4 points remaining. Even with that you have some options that people are going to argue about - do you take Feral Aggression, Predatory Strikes, Stampede or Infected Wounds? You have to spend at least 5 points in some of those. Later on, do you take Brutal Impact, Nurturing Instinct, Survival Instincts or Primal Madness? Of all of those, you have to spend at least 8 points in there. And that's not even counting herobear/bearcat mixed specs that use something like Thick Hide or Natural Reaction! So you've got a monumental 12 points to play around with.

So even if we wanted to skip some of these talents we can't. Here's the dirty secret: many really aren't optional. Here's the list of talents that every raiding and heroic-queueing cat must have, and why:

Must haves:

1. Nurturing Instinct. Healing is very, very hard, and anything that makes it easier to heal you is good. However, that's not what makes this talent must-have. What makes this absolutely needed is the huge boost it gives to Tranquility. While it's on a very long cooldown Tranquility is something every druid should be using or ready to use in many situations in raiding, and being able to get a lot of healing out of it is important. It'll never be as good as a Balance druid's version, but it still is much better. Think of it as the new version of innervate; instead of giving mana back to a healer, it's giving mana back to a healer in the form of smart heals that heal for a ton.

2. Brutal Impact. The argument against Brutal Impact was that so many other classes have good interrupts that it's really not necessary. Okay, that's true in 25 man to a point - though there are enough 'random stack on this add' that that isn't quite as true, and it does add a small but significant charge effect.

But what about 10-man? In a 10-man you're probably one of 2 or maybe three melee. The chances of any of them having a good interrupt is fairly low. Chances are you'll have to have an interrupting team - and Skull Bash is just as good for it as anything out there.

Where it really shines is in 5-mans. While there aren't that many bosses that have 'must have' interrupts in 5 mans, there are a few. More importantly almost every single trash pack has interruptable abilities that do a ton of damage or cause chaos. If you can interrupt those, the runs go much more smoothly. Help your healers and tank out and go interrupt stuff. Learn how to do it now - because you will be asked to do it later.

3. Survival Instincts. This one is pretty easy to understand: every 5 minutes it's very, very hard to kill you. Again, another mana-saver for healers, a life-saver for you, and a very easy way to prevent damage by going bear, popping this and Frenzied regen. Get used to using it regularly in boss fights, particularly in heroics. It also helps go herobear and use this too. Raid strategies will be based around being able to use personal cooldowns to survive big attacks - and honestly Barkskin just doesn't cut it sometimes.

Most everyone expects you have this, and you do have it right?

1. Feral Aggression. This was almost must-have. The primary reason isn't the boost to Ferocious Bite (though that is a small DPS increase at 25% and less), it's the applying sunders instantaneously, 3 at a time, for 5 minutes. This is far better than the warrior or the rogue version. The rogue version takes energy, the warrior version takes rage and a GCD. Faerie Fire gets applied at range (usually before the fight starts), cats aren't GCD bound and usually can pool energy without any DPS issues and having all three sunders up early is a great boost. If you don't have this you're going to take up 3 GCDs and 12 seconds to put up all the FF stacks. While the GCDs don't hurt, this means you're going to be doing a decent amount less damage in those 12 seconds. What's worse is that all your friends are too. It isn't a requirement, but given that it boosts personal DPS and raid DPS and is the best way to put up sunders you should have it - just like you forced those warriors to sunder so the rogues didn't have to, you should too.

The rest are pretty much your choice. Note that if you take these talents you basically have 5 points to split amongst the rest of the optional ones - one of which must go into a tier five talent or less.

Some of you might be asking why Primal Madness is considered optional. The reason is that it's a very situational, small DPS increase. For two talent points you get 20 more energy, which by itself is half as good as Tiger's Fury. That's not great but is okay. The problem is that when the buff fades, you lose up to 20 energy right away. It's very rare that you can end at 0 energy just as the debuff goes off, so most of the time it'll be at best a very small DPS gain. You can in theory micromanage it so that you cancel the debuff just as you use the ability that causes you to lose the energy (for example, macroing shred to cancel the Primal Madness debuff) but even then you're likely to lose 4-5 energy simply from latency. It's just not that great.

So the reality is that you basically have 5 talent points to spend as you see fit outside of the above, and at least one needs to be in a tier-5 talent. This is one reason that it's hard to do the bearcat build - you have to skip out on at least one of those talents, and chances are it's either Nurturing Instinct (which is incredible) or Brutal Impact (which is mandatory for 5-mans). Or you gimp your bear slightly, not taking Infected Wounds or Pulverize. It's a hard choice, and ultimately one I can't advocate - even though there have been a ton of times I've had to go herobear and tank something for a while.

That being said - bear gear and cat gear have never, ever been closer. And if you want to be a herobear, all you really need is Thick Hide.

[Druid]Could it be - a Cataclysm talent tree that almost works?

With build 12644, the Cataclysm beta has a feral tree that is almost functionally useful. I say 'almost' because...well, you'll see. But it's certainly better than what we've seen before, and so far it's the most reasonable feral tree since the 31-point massacre.

For the first time one can spec bear or cat and not actually have to take cat/bear talents. That's pretty neat. Sure, most of the talents still don't do anything, others are not working as intended, and many of the actual abilities related to those talents aren't working properly - but who cares, right? Let's look at the talent trees.

First up, a basic bear build:

This is a 0/33/8 build, in case you were curious. Most of the points are mandatory, though one could spend the last two points from Improved Feral Charge and put them into the last point of Natural Shapeshifter and one point in Master Shapeshifter. No purely cat talents are taken here, and anything that could give some survival as a bear is taken. It's a very basic build, but as stated above there's not a lot of room for flexibility here. All the talents that aren't taken are basically cat talents with marginal or negative usefulness as a bear. Even Natural Shapeshifter is just filler for Perseverance, as the mana cost for shapeshifting is absurdly low currently. Thanks to giving a mini-charge, I consider Brutal Impact to be mandatory for all ferals. I guess one could spec out of Infected Wounds, but there's really not a lot else you might want as strictly bear.

I do have to say I'm thrilled with the change to Feral Aggression; between it making it apply all three stacks at once, FFF not costing rage any more, and it being a lower tier talent it is much, much better.

One big problem here is that the resto tree, as far as ferals are concerned, is very, very poor. Furor still only gives rage back 60% of the time, but it's the best tank talent there is in the first tier. I assume it'll be improved and made 100% with three points, but that's still not amazing. Blessing of the Grove is useless for a bear, and Natural Shapeshifter is almost useless. It's all filler to get to Perseverance. Then we have the rest of the tree, and one can literally take every single talent that affects bear performance positively with the points. I'm assuming that Enrage still reduces armor (it does currently) - in which case King of the Jungle and Primal Madness remain cat-only. So while the tree looks workable, it's not exactly fun, and there's certainly not a lot of agonizing over what choices to make.

Similarly, let's check out the basic cat build:

This is a 0/34/7 build. And similar to bear, there's not a lot of 'choice' here, though there's a bit more than bear. I'm assuming that Predatory Strikes remains mostly a pvp talent, as doing three rakes at the start of a fight with a 90% crit rate sounds like a stellar way to...pull aggro. While Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter are marginal (4 talent points for 2% crit) there's really not a lot of option to spend it on otherwise. The only cat-like utility that could exist is Infected Wounds; I elected to buy Survival Instincts and put the final point in 1/3 Furor. And again, given that it gives you a 10-second charge, I consider Brutal Impact a mandatory talent.

Again, the resto tree just sucks for ferals at this point. There's no compelling reason like Omen of Clarity to go deep in the tree, and no talent like Naturalist that gives a really awesome boost to damage per talent point.

So...if bears don't hugely want resto, and cats don't hugely want resto, why take resto? And that leads me to the main reason why I believe the talent trees themselves aren't done yet: the 0/41/0 build.

This takes almost every useful talent in the feral tree, skipping only Predatory Strikes and a point in Nurturing Instinct. One could swap that around as well, having only one point in infected wounds or something like that. This basically would make a completely functional bear and cat build all in one. What does it lose?

From bear, it loses 6% spell damage reduction, 60% chance of 10 rage on shifting to bear, and potentially 2% more damage.

From cat it loses 4% shred damage, 2% crit chance.

Is that optimal? No. But it's very flexible, and if you don't tank a huge amount (or primarily offtank heavy physical damage dealers) or want to have a feral build AND a spellcasting build, this is a pretty nice choice. It loses no utility from bear, compromises very little on threat and only a small amount on incoming damage. It loses a small amount of damage from cat that may be irrelevant depending on how good mangle turns out to be compared to shred; right now mangle is actually neck and neck with shred with the 10% mangle glyph, though all of that is likely to be modified.

This is made possible by the complete lack of super compelling talents in the resto tree. And not a ton of compelling talents in the bear/cat tree, either.

I don't really like this, honestly; I want the difference between a cat and a bear build to be profound. If you wanted to do that before, you'd lose out on quite a bit of good damage dealing talents (like 10% more damage on crits) and have almost no utility. Now you gain all the utility and only lose a bit of damage. That's not enough.

I hope that the feral tree will gain a few more interesting, cool abilities that make you want to take them and make you sweat about which one you didn't take. I also really want resto to have some close to mandatory talents for both specs, so you can't spend all your points in the feral tree like a n00b who thought they could ONLY spend their points in one tree. Unfortunately we're likely to be pretty close to being done with ferals, at least as far as their talents go; my gut feeling is that we'll see a couple of juggled talents here and there, but largely the next step is going to be balance and number crunching. Still, a guy can hope - and at least this time the tree is mostly sane.

[Druid] the first iteration of the 31-point talent tree

As seen on MMO-champ, the latest build of the beta has been released, and with it comes the new 31-point maximum talent trees.

And they're horrible for ferals.

Note that ferals are one of the classes that have had the least amount of time spent on their tree. Expect this to change drastically in the near future. Which is good, because as it stands things are totally broken.

Here's some of the things I know about that are broken that need to be addressed at some point in the Cataclysm iteration:

Talents

Tier 1:

• Predatory Strikes is a mandatory talent. Not useful at all for bears, and only marginal use for cats.

Tier 2:

• Primal Fury is missing the extra combo point generation for cats. So it's a bear only talent.
• Bears want all 9 talent points at tier 2. Cats want 5 at best.

Tier 3:

• A cat must take either improved feral charge or thick hide.
• A bear must take charge or King of the Jungle (which isn't that good unless you're using 4pT10 or they remove the armor loss on enrage) unless they spent all 9 points in tier 2.

Tier 4:

• In order to progress, a cat must take one point in nurturing instinct, infected wounds or primal fury.
• There's no improved leader of the pack.

Tier 5;

• A cat needs to take Survival Instincts to progress. Or natural reaction, I suppose.

Tier 6 and 7 are 'fine', though Rend & Tear has been reduced to a 3 point talent without changing the scaling (so a nerf from 20% to 12%). Nom Nom Nom has stayed in. Berserk is largely useless for bears, but more on that later.

Resto tier 1:

• Furor has been changed to a 3 point talent (yay) but the scaling has not changed, so it only does a 60% chance no matter what (boo). Bears can choose between boosting their claw and shred damage by 4% or reducing their shapeshifting costs. Yay.

Resto tier 2:

• There is nothing worth getting for cats past furor and blessing of the grove. For bears, they want perseverance. Even then, it's only 8 points total in the tree.

Outstanding bugs:

• If you ever had primal precision, you will have 10 expertise.
• Combo point generation for cats is horrible without getting extra CPs from crits.
• Rake bleeds crit for only 1.5x damage.
• Improved feral charge does not work at all.
• Thrash does not have any interaction with swipe at all.
• Mangle debuff lasts for 12 seconds.
• The mangle ability you get at lvl 10 is the mangle debuff and not the actual mangle attack.
• Faerie fire (cat) doesn't exist.
• Bleeds do not scale with haste.
• Energy regen does not scale with haste.
• Nom Nom Nom does not function (does nothing for rip duration less than 25%)
• Shred's cost is not reduced
• There is no crit damage multiplier for cats (so it's base 200%)
• Ferals lost 10% AP
• No improved leader of the pack - no mana regen or health.
• Innervate scales with the caster's mana, not the target.
• Pulverize still does almost no damage compared to maul.
• Mangle does very little damage compared to maul.
• Swipe's scaling is horrible and does about 1/4 the damage it does on live
• faerie fire costs 15 rage
• Savage Defense scales statically with AP.

Some of these will be addressed really soon. Others will be addressed as we figure out balance. In any case, it's not exactly fun to play a feral right now; you have to spam claw.

That's right, claw.

It'll get better. Don't panic! But don't think that things are all that hawt right now. If I don't mention a lot, it's because there's not a lot to mention.

[Druid] The (possible) shape of things to come

Out of curiousity, I went through the feral tree (along with the resto tree's small bits) to look at talents that just boosted x by a certain amount - because in theory most of them are going to be replaced with more 'fun' talents. In addition, I wanted to get rid of any talents that only boosted buffs, as they're going away too. I also looked at what might get cut or pruned down, since only part of it was buffing random stats and whatnot.

Here's the list of things I think will be removed:

Improved mark - almost certainly out
Naturalist - out (at least for ferals)

Master Shapeshifter - out, most likely

Thick Hide - out? (only boosts armor, which might fall into the generic survival part for mastery)

Sharpened Claws - out (flat increase to crit, and that's all; covered entirely by mastery boost in cat)

Heart of the Wild - out (while it does a bunch of things, all of them are either damage or health or intellect, and we don't care)

Protector of the Pack - out. Sorry, Darksend, but both of these things are entirely in the scope of the mastery abilities for bears.

Rend and Tear - out? It only affects damage but does so on certain abilities. It's a definer in terms of damage on cats and bears currently - but is that the sort of thing they want 45-point talents to be?

Primal Gore - out (they've already stated all dots and hots will crit, so this will do nothing)

Here's what I suspect they'll prune or modify:

Feral Aggression - Pruned (may only affect Ferocious Bite, since the Demo Roar part is going away)

Predatory Strikes - Pruned (does too much, and part of it is a pure damage boost)

Natural Reaction - Pruned/in (depends on if 'gains more dodge' is going to be acceptable or not)

Survival of the Fittest - pruned? (the crit reduction in bear form and the armor contribution may stay. The 'all stats are awesome' boost is likely to go or be split out.

And here's what I think is largely going to stay pretty similar:

Furor- sadly, probably in

Natural Shapeshifter - in, possibly

Omen of Clarity - in

Feral Instinct - In (boost of swipe and boost in prowling, fun talent)

Savage Fury - in (boosts specific abilities, not generic damage)

Feral Swiftness - in (fun)

Survival Instincts - in (fun, new ability)

Shredding attacks - in (specific ability)

Primal Fury - in (rage/CP gain is a spec definer)

Primal Precision - in (though possibly pruned or split)

Brutal Impact - in (useful)

Feral Charge - in (fun)

Nurturing Instinct - in (fun, interesting)

Leader of the Pack - in

Imp Leader of the Pack - in; while it boosts a buff, it does so in a way that sometimes you may not want, and the buff isn't a generic one

Primal Tenacity - in

Predatory Instincts - in (though may be split up)

Infected Wounds - in, but probably reduced to one rank

King of the Jungle - in

Mangle - in

Imp Mangle - in (though hopefully made a bit more interesting)

Ferocity- In (rage/energy reduction isn't straight +damage or stats)

Berserk - in

Behold, the face of your new tree:

Too soon? Okay, sorry restoers. Keep the tree form alive!

No, this (thanks to my crappy MSPaint skills) is something like what the new tree will not have, or have modified:

What's really interesting to me is the amount of resto talents that are going away. Almost all are boring talents that we take to get to OoC for. I don't know how they can make talents that are interesting to take for all three specs, but these...aren't them. The rest of the tree though...it's not going through (or doesn't have to go through) huge changes. I was honestly expecting it to look like a buzzsaw, but it really doesn't seem that way. I do home more cat and bear abilities become baseline; it's not that much fun to take a lot of talents that basically allow you to function in that role. For example, mangle isn't a 'fun' talent, exactly. It's a necessary one. Giving mangle the shred treatment (making it cost absurd rage/energy if you didn't have it talented) would allow people to have mangle but not clutter up the tree with it.

Also, congrats to Casually Serious, who got down Professor Putricide last night. They're now 11/12 Hard modes. :)

[Druid] Use this spec AT YOUR OWN PERIL, EARTH HUMAN

That's a...fox? And a...tasmanian devil? Google images never fails me.

One of the odd things that I see from time to time is people armorying me to get the 'default' spec for tanking, using it blindly because they assume that if I'm doing it, it's optimal.

Well, naturally it is. I am the allmighty Kalon, and nothing I say could ever be wrong.

The question you should ask yourself is this: if Kalon's doing the optimal spec, what is he optimizing for? And with that, I bring you the totally wacky 56/15 spec. Or here, if you like the armory.

Okay, the first thing you're probably thinking is: the hell?

Most of the stuff is the same as what I've mentioned in the bear FAQ and even in the antiquated core tanking talent post. But there are some oddities that I'll mention. First, though, let me explain the reasoning.

This is a tanking talent tree only for main tanking, and it assumes that during a fight you will only be tanking. Cat DPS is incidental. Tanking when not being attacked is not the issue and should not be accounted for. This is also not designed to tank multiple adds.

Furthermore, this is for specifically tanking Anub'arak in heroic mode. For Anub'arak, you do not want improved Leader of the Pack; the healing is too random to count on, but gives too much healing to want to keep around. As such, removing it is very good; for our kill, removing it removed about 300,000 healing, which essentially meant removing 2100 HPS on the boss.

It also assumes essentially infinite rage situations; while tanking, you're expected to be taking massive damage. Rage should not normally be an issue.

With these things in mind, here are some of the controversial calls.

1. No Omen of Clarity. If you have infinite rage, Omen of Clarity is pointless for bear tanking; it gains you nothing. It's unpredictable anyway. It's essential for good cat dps (even with bear talents), but since we don't care about that in this spec, it's gone. It's essentially one point wasted.
2. No Ferocity. This is such a no-brainer to take; druids have been trained since birth to pick this. 5 less rage on mauls, swipes, and mangles? Of COURSE this is a good talent.
   Except that in infinite rage situations, it's not that important. It does mean that with a streak of avoidance you will get rage-starved; this happened to me a couple times. It also means that it's very, very important to pull with a full 40 rage (or more)But for the most part I didn't miss it when tanking Anub', or Beasts, or Twins. It's not necessary to get to tier 2 either if you're taking Feral Aggression.
   
3. No Improved Leader of the Pack. Normally this is something that at least one feral in the raid should have; it's stabilizing and a decent amount of heals, and usually points are there for it. In this case, however, Anub'arak needs to have exactly the right amount of deliberate and predictable healing so that we can limit the healing as much as possible. That means unpredictable heals that we can't rely on to passively heal a group have to go. Honestly, we didn't miss this at all in the fights save perhaps Faction Champs.
4. Feral Aggression and Infected Wounds are needed. This is because our warrior is going maximum threat/deep wounds, which means no improved Demo Shout. And I need to make sure the slow effect is up on my target, so Infected Wounds is required too. This is a requirement for our fights in general, so no big change here.
5. Improved Mangle AND Master Shapeshifter? Wow. Yeah, that's right - with the above changes I have enough points to take basically anything that improves threat throughout the fight. King of the Jungle isn't taken because I can't use it; I must not have 25% armor reduction. But I can take the above. Improved Mangle actually deserves some credit here. Because I'm having to do things like demo roar and refresh my lacerate stack early so that neither drop off during freezing slash, the rotation doesn't look like a rotation so much as a priority system. And if you're doing a lot of other things anyway, being able to mangle more actually improves your rotation and your threat quite a bit. I need to work out exactly how much, but I'd ballpark it at more like 4-5% instead of 2.5-3%. It also helps uptime with your Idol of the Corrupter, so that's nice too.
   
   And on this, as much damage as you can muster is good. For our kill I managed to do 2800 DPS, which isn't bad on a single target using primarily survival gear.
6. No Maul Glyph. Another one that I miss - but if you've read me before, you know that I think glyphs are the new flask. Still, this has some explanation. I don't actually care about growl that much on Anub'arak, but it was important that my mauls don't hit another target. This is because occasionally a burrower would get close enough to me that I'd hit it with maul if I wasn't lucky - and that might mean that it went to me instead of the add tank. That meant instant wipe. Easy to fix - just swap glyphs back and forth, and you're set.
   

The end result was a fairly strong MT build. Only a couple times on bad avoidance streaks did I have any rage issues. My DPS sucked when switching to cat on adds, but not so much that it mattered hugely.

Heroics, though...were a totally different experience. It was like playing through molasses. Just painful. Fortunately I outgear content enough that if need be I'll just switch to my DPS spec and tank that way. I won't have PotP or NR or a lot of important tanking talents, but it won't matter. I'll have the essential speedy attacks, and taking more damage will mean more rage.

It's also a really horrible spec to solo in without imp lotp.

Ony was also a bit hit and miss; the transition from p2 to p3 left me with a lot of threat to make up, and not a lot of rage. It wasn't the funnest thing ever.

Still - it was great to have a substantial threat gain from what I had had before. Mauls hit for more, and mangles were going off all the time. It felt a lot more in control, and most importantly I did significantly more damage while keeping all of my necessary survival talents. If you want to go against some of the 'standard' experiences - you might try it.

IF. YOU. DARE.

[Druid]The Anti-tank: maximizing DPS for fun and profit

The above was what I found when I searched for 'anti tank' in images. It turns out that there were such a thing as 'anti tank dogs' in Russia which had explosives wrapped around them and then were sent to go kill tanks. They didn't work because, well, they were trained to find food under Russian tanks, which meant they tended to blow up their friends as well as enemies. But the image was too awesome to pass up. There's your history lesson for the day.

A disclaimer: This is not for starting tanks. This is not for those struggling on progression content. This is not a guide on how to gear up for Naxx if you haven't already.

As Karthis pointed out recently, kitty DPS is now really, really fun and challenging. Runy at UnbearablyHoT linked to a couple addons that help manage the difficult priority scheme of kitty rotations. Flyv's talked about doing cat and bear for a while now.

And now I've caught the bug.

I think it starts innocently. "Hmm, I wonder how much DPS manglespam can actually do?". Then you look, and it's not so bad. Then you wonder if you got King of the Jungle for a bit more energy, whether you could get a nicer rotation and take advantage of that juicy 50% crit bonus on ferocious bite. Then you start wondering about whether things like improved mangle are REALLY that important, and get shredding attacks.

You know, just to try it out. Just for a bit. Just to see how it feels.

Then you start beating other DPS players on fights. You start beating other melee in your crappy, unenchanted blues and suboptimal spec. "This is pretty good", you think. "I'm almost at the point where I can tank with the best of them and DPS pretty well with the same spec! All I need is a gear swap, and I'm good to go for whatever! "

Welcome back, TBC ferals. We missed you.

Then 3.0.8 hits, and yeah, for some of you (like me) your armor got reduced in your better tanking spec. It's a bummer, but your threat should still be pretty strong and you're still scaling ridiculously with stamina for things like Sarth3D. You still have stupid mitigation on Patchwerk. You still do great damage on trash.

Then you accidentally put on your cat gear and look at your character sheet in bear...and are shocked as your armor increased by 50%.

Then you start wondering...what's the difference between cat and bear gear any more?
Both have stamina.
Both have agility.
Both have the same amount of armor, at least on leather.
Furthermore, because of the change to armor on jewelry, agility on those DPS jewelry pieces becomes pretty valuable, and those DPS rings, amulets and cloaks start looking really decent.

So what's the difference? Really, it's about how you gem and enchant it. Otherwise it's basically exactly the same.

The question then becomes whether it's possible and reasonable to tank in cat gear with a cat hybrid spec. That's the holy grail, right there - can you tank reasonably well without switching gear for cat? Can you do kitty DPS reasonably well without switching gear? Can you have one spec AND gear set that does great cat damage and great bear damage while being able to tank?

Because if you can...you're the best slot for an OT, bar none. You can DPS on KT for the first half of the fight, do competitive DPS, and then go tank a couple adds in the second half. You can tank one of Thaddius's friends and then jump down and kill Thaddius while the other tank goes nuts. You can obliterate trash as cat and if something goes wrong or you draw aggro, just switch to bear and beat the hell out of 'em that way. You can DPS on Malygos in P1, tank and DPS in P2 and go to town later.

Or you can just tank the hell out of things and put out so much threat even paladins get jealous.

So what would this mythical gearset look like? Well, there are two approaches we can do, and I'll cover both. The first is to maximize survivability while trying to do the most damage as bear and cat. The second is to maximize damage as cat while doing okay on survivability as bear.

Maximizing Damage

For maximizing damage, the main thing is the enchants that we don't normally want in bear. The amount of DPS we gain from agility vs strength is pretty small - but the big enchants change a lot. The secondary thing is things like trinkets and to a lesser extent rings. But we'll get there shortly.

For your weapon and idol, remember that you can swap gear when you change forms, all on the same GCD. So we can have a totally different weapon and idol. This will allow you to get a lot of expertise and a different enchant on the weapon for bear and pure dps for cat. Something like...Inevitable Defeat would be good if you want to maximize threat. Still, it's going to lose out to Journey's End, but that's a good placeholder. This also allows you to enchant your DPS weapon with massacre or berserk, which is much better than mongoose too. :)

So gem like crazy for agility, hit and expertise. This sounds suspiciously like the guide for bears already, and you'd be right - except for certain slots. Those slots are the ones with DPS-centric enchants, and that's what I'll cover now.

For the head, you'll want to get a head with a metagem and use relentless earthsiege and the arcanum of ferocity. Both of these are strictly DPS-only, so you don't want to wreck your normal set with them. (or maybe you do, but I'd advise against it). The difference between this enchant and gem is about 4% DPS alone, so that should give you some motivation. Since it's DPS, you should go for strength or hit too.

For the shoulders, it's the better axe vs better pinnacle enchants from Hodir. This is actually something that you can skip out on if you want to; the gain from the enchant is not that much. Still, I find that leather dps shoulders drop often, so you should be able to pick them up okay.

For the legs, well, leg quality differs drastically from item to item, but the big thing is the leg enchant. The DPS leg enchant is roughly 1.5% more DPS as well, by itself. Try and get Leggings of the Honored if at all possible (yes, this is Sarth2d), as they have more armor and a huge amount of hit, great for both roles.

For the bracers, it's mostly whether you have leatherworking or not. The huge AP bonus is another 1.5% DPS right there, but giving up 90 stamina is really tough. Again, try and get another good set of bracers and use them.

For your jewelry Favor of the Dragon Queen gives great DPS and is one of the better survival necks in the game now. For rings, the Greatring of Collision is exceptional but hard to find (drops off of 10-man Sarth2D). The Strong-handed ring is another good option for both. Hemmoraging Circle is a nice compromise too, but not great. On the cloak, try and pry from their cold, dead hands the Drape of the Deadly Foe, but more likely spend the badges on Hammerhead Sharkskin Cloak.

For trinkets, the #1, by far, is Darkmoon Card: Greatness. Good benefits for both specs. For the other, I'd recommend a hit trinket like Grim Toll if you can do it.

If you're following along, this is what you'd have assuming good gear elsewhere:
Head: Valorous + Relentless and arcanum of ferocity and agililty gems
Neck: favor of the dragon queen
Shoulders: valorous + greater axe + agility gems
Cloak: drape of the deadly foe + major agility
Chest: Chestguard of the recluse (better for threat thanks to the expertise) + powerful stats + agility
Wrists: Wristwraps of the cutthroat + attack power (I'm assuming leatherworking here)
Gloves: Valorous + major agility
Belt: Belt of the Tortured + socket & agility
Legs: Leggings of the honored + icescale + agility/expertise stam (for meta)
Feet: Footwraps of vile deceit (or dawnwalkers) + superior agility + agility/hit (for metagem)
Rings: Greatring of Collision + 6 all stats, Strong-Handed ring
Trinket: Darkmoon Card Greatness, Grim Toll
Weapon: Journey's End + Massacre (for cat), Origin of Nightmares + Mongoose (for bear)
Idol: Idol of Worship for cat, idol of terror for bear

Now let's plug that in for Rawr.
Stats for bears, raid-buffed: 36.8k armor, 56.3% avoidance, 37k health. 3621 DPS, and a nice even 8000 TPS.
Stats for cats, raid-buffed: 5081 DPS, 48% crit

That's pretty awesome. It's also ideal in terms of buffs, single target rotation, etc. And has some really absurd gear. Still...this is what's possible. Note that there's nothing here that really is a make or break item, either. Grim toll is nice, but mirror of truth will do well too. Favor of the Dragon Queen is great, as is Chestguard of recluse, but a lot of the ilvl 213 items will do similarly.

Something to note is that if you replace all the agility gems with strength and replace the compromise slots (DM:G with strength, one of the rings) you only gain about 40 DPS, but lose a good couple % of dodge. Honestly, I don't think it's worth it.

Maximizing Survivability.
For this, we're starting with the bear first and then making a couple compromises for cats. That means more stamina and mostly changes in the enchants.

The first thing to realize is that we don't have to change much of the gear. This was kind of a surprise to me too, actually; I was rallying to make the tanking rings, amulets and cloak not as good as they are, but really it doesn't take all that much. Agility is just that good, and a lot of the time the stamina is very competitive. Still, we're going to swap one ring at least, and one trinket; there's no need to go for a pure threat trinket here. Note that if you can get your hands on two Darkmoon cards (one for strength, one for agi), in theory those would be the two best trinkets in the game for bears and two of the three best for cats. I'm not sure whether you can do that though - they're unique-equipped, but they're different item registries.

So we'll change the greatring to a gatekeeper. We'll get back our 2% meta and normal head enchant. We'll get our tanking leg and shoulder enchants back. And we'll go with those wrist enchants.

Head: Valorous + Austere and arcanum of Stalwart Protector and agililty gems
Neck: favor of the dragon queen + agility gem
Shoulders: valorous + greater pinnacle + agility gems
Cloak: drape of the deadly foe + major agility
Chest: Chestguard of the recluse (better for threat thanks to the expertise) + powerful stats + agility
Wrists: Wristwraps of the cutthroat + stamina (I'm assuming leatherworking here)
Gloves: Valorous + major agility
Belt: Belt of the Tortured + socket & agility
Legs: Leggings of the honored + frosthide + agility/expertise stam (for meta)
Feet: Footwraps of vile deceit (or dawnwalkers) + superior agility + defense/stam (for metagem)
Rings: Gatekeeper, Strong-Handed ring
Trinket: Darkmoon Card Greatness, Valor Medal (or essence if you wanted)
Weapon: Journey's End + Massacre (for cat), Origin of Nightmares + Mongoose (for bear)
Idol: Idol of Worship for cat, idol of terror for bear

Bear stats: 37900 armor, 55% dodge, 38.2k health (or 40k health with essence long with 53.8% dodge). 3043 DPS, 6747 TPS
Cat stats: 4565DPS, 46% crit

The difference in the mitigation and avoidance values isn't that high, shockingly - but the difference in the TPS/DPS is pretty amazing. This should illustrate the new math: the difference between DPS and tanking gear is overall quite small.

Now clearly you shouldn't use this on Sarth3D. And this takes advantage of all the raid buffs you can get normally, so if you're doing 10-mans this might not be perfect (though it won't be far off, and having a tank who can DPS regularly in 10-mans is pretty advantageous).

Also, this is Rawr. Rawr's damage models aren't perfect. I think it overvalues armor penetration significantly, for instance, which is why Wristwraps of the Cutthroat are showing up so high. But it's going to be close, and it's going to be spot-on with respect to avoidance, mitigation and survival in bear form.

Since my gear set for Sarth3D is basically set, I think I'm going to start working on this set now. And yes, I'll be using that dps set full time, thank you very much. :)

[Druid] The core 3.02/WotLK bear talents

Bears have choices.

Many, many, many choices. Probably too many. And of course, things will change; since I did my first preview two months ago bears have added several new abilities, talents and skills to their repetoire. So I'll go with both the generic and the specific on this so that in case anything else comes up, it'll be at least mostly accurate.

For bears as for all tanks, the rule has been ever simple: survival first, then threat, then situational abilities. Sure, you can go for the threat build early on and make your DPS happy, but if you die it won't matter at all. That was actually a viable build for paladins post T6, for instance, and it may be a viable strategy for bears. But I'm considering the case where you're facing a boss that hits harder than you've ever seen, or makes it so that healers simply can't heal you that often. Or when, simply, you're at the edge of progression and need the survival. That's the general thinking on tanking and what we'll go with first in terms of priority.

The essential talents for all bears are:
Ferocity (5 points)
Thick Hide (3 points)
Savage Fury (2 points)
Survival Instincts (1 point)
Feral Swiftness (2 points)
Feral Charge (1 point)
Predatory Strikes (3 points)
Heart of the Wild (5 points)
Natural Reaction (3 points)
Survival of the Fittest (3 points)
Leader of the Pack (1 point)
Protector of the Pack (3 points)
Mangle (1 point)

Total talent points required: 33

That surprised me too. Since WotLK launched I've felt feral was overbloated, but the fact is that the core tanking talents aren't really that big. The big problem here is tier 6; Tier 6 has 11 talent points in essential talents, but there are only 17 talent points before it that are absolutely required.

From there, you get a lot of talents that rock but are not required for any specific reason. Why? Because they either all deal with threat at around 1% more threat per talent point, are situational, or are buffs that are taken care of by other classes.

As I said above, the tricky part is tiers 1-5. There are only 17 talent points that are required. The rest are situational and may be wanted or not depending. The classic build would have 3 points in Sharpened Claws, two in Primal Fury, and three in Feral Instinct. Those could also be put into Feral Aggression as well. Personally, I would put the points into Primal Precision before Primal Fury. In any case, you need 8 more points to get to 25, but after that you need exactly 41 to get everything that is required in the feral tree including mangle. And 52 total for the 11 point resto tax.

From there, it comes down to a lot of personal preference and the big bugaboo - raid utility versus threat output. Of the remaining talents, I would get them in the following order:

Primal Fury
Improved Mangle
Rend and Tear
Berserk

That's a total of 52 points spent in the feral tree. Why those 4?

Primal Fury is a requirement for doing cat DPS. It also helps quite a bit with offtanking and when tanking multiple mobs with swipe can give essentially infinite rage.
Improved Mangle is not a huge threat win; replacing one swipe or lacerate in 6 seconds with one mangle is not actually as big of a threat gain on a single target as you might think. This, however, enables fairly decent DPS using mangle spam for cats without requiring shredding attacks.
Rend And Tear is close to the best threat benefit, point for point, that bears have. Since maul makes up 50% of our threat currently, each point in R&T is a 2% threat boost, straight up. That's almost as good as primal precision. That it also helps cat DPS cycles is a bonus.
Berserk is just fun. A fear ward is great, but 10 mangles in 15 seconds is just a huge boost of early threat. Mostly, it's a fun talent that should be taken because it increases your joy.

Assuming the standard 11 points in the resto tree to get Omen of Clarity, what's left? Well, if you've followed my advice, you've got 7 talent points to play with, and the following talents to put them in that are worth anything:

Improved Leader of the Pack (2 points)
Feral Aggression (5 points)
Shredding Attacks (2 points)
Brutal Impact (2 points)
Infected Wounds (3 points)
King of the Jungle (3 points)
Master Shapeshifter (essentially 5 points)
Predatory Instincts (3 points)

And again, we come down to utility vs. threat vs. cat.

On the cat talents: Shredding attacks is almost entirely a cat talent, but it's a good one. Shred is still the winner on DPS, though it's not nearly as high a winner as it used to be thanks to mangle being buffed to 200% damage. Despite the tooltip, Predatory Instincts is 100% a cat talent; it does nothing for bear for either ability, at least right now. It is still a big boost to cat DPS. King of the Jungle is primarily for cat and is a big boost there, though an early enrage to build up threat combined with berserk means such a huge threat lead it's not funny.

The utility talents: brutal impact gives bears an actually useful interrupt at 30 seconds. This isn't the most essential in a raid environment but could be really nice for 5-mans. Feral Aggression is required if your raid doesn't have it but is likely better taken by a warrior if possible; it's not as costly to them to spec into as it is for druids. Improved Leader of the Pack is a middling useful talent. The healing rarely helps tons, though now that it's raidwide it may be a bit better. The mana back is nice for soloing and pvp. Infected Wounds is another talent similar to feral aggression; it's needed if your group doesn't have it already, but pretty superfluous if they do - and all the tank classes get something similar to it for cheaper.

Master shapeshifter helps threat and helps cat as well, but the 5 points spent to get it are very costly. 5 points for 4% more damage or 4% more crit rating is not a particularly good bargain no matter how you slice it. I don't recommend this any more, but for the best threat possible this is what you want.

And that's it. And really, after those 41 points you can do almost anything. If you need a high-utility build, take feral aggression instead of rend & tear, take infected wounds instead of improved mangle, and take brutal impact along with imp LotP. If you want to be more of a hybrid take king of the jungle, predatory instincts, shredding attacks and drop imp mangle. Even furor isn't necessary to max out, and putting two points in Imp mark of the wild is a decent idea.

It's no longer the case that every feral is going to have the same 47/14 build where 10 of those points are very flexible. But all bears should have the same 33/11 core talents, with 8 of those spent in different ways depending. I like that there is more chance for true hybridization or situational abilities or dealing with needs in the raid. The tree is looking pretty sharp right now. I would like to see more spreading of essential talents for bears and cats and possibly a separation of ferocity and feral aggression into a cat-only and bear-only talent, but these are quibbles. And as long as you go for those 33/11 points, you should be good to tank anything.

[Druid] The 2.5 patch - bear/generalist talent build edition

Yes, yes, the sky is falling, the black goat has been seen as far afield as Luton, we're all gonna die.

I am, of course, talking about the content push that will have ferals getting their new talents, skills and horrible itemization coming in the 'upcoming weeks' while TBC is the big kahuna. We don't know what build we'll be getting, we don't know what talents or skills will be changing, and we have no clue what will be done for itemization.

So let's everyone panic a bit.



Okay, better?

Now that we've gotten that out of our system, let's talk about what build we're going to spec to. Keep in mind - this is a spec for Burning Crusade. This isn't the lvl 80 spec or even what you'll be leveling with come Wrath. This is trying to answer the question of what you should be raiding with when the patch comes out for Burning Crusade content. (thanks, Felkan - I totally left this out)

The big thing to note is that with only (hah) 61 points, there is no way to get both Omen of Clarity and Berserk in the same build. Omen of Clarity is being changed to be far, far better in Wrath/3.0 (it will proc only on white attacks but it will proc all the time), giving cats a huge dps boost. Berserk is a huge dps boost but only for 15 seconds every 5 minutes.

The important thing is this: If you want to tank, you'll take berserk. If you want to DPS, you'll take Omen of Clarity.

I've not fully made up my mind on that, to be honest. Bears have been getting by without berserk for a while now, and it's been okay. But omen of clarity doesn't do that much for tanking, and berserk is just a silly good ability for tanking. It's worth it for tanking Archi alone. It's worth it for tanking flames, given how much damage and threat you can put out. And it would be good to get it into your available buttons so you're more used to it. Plus it's damn fun. Omen of Clarity is kinda boring, but being able to mangle three targets while getting tons of rage and doing massive damage AND not taking as much damage? Ooh, fun times.

Of course, it is likely that ferals are going to get a major revamp to the talent trees coming up soon. Who knows what the talents are going to be like? This could easily be out of date tomorrow.

That doesn't stop me from rampant speculation. :)

With all that being said, I think I'll be going with the 51/10 build. The goal of this one is to have a good selection of tanking talents while being able to do good (if not the best) damage as a cat. Just so you don't have to swap back and forth, here's what it looks like, text wise:

Balance (0 points)

None

Feral Combat (51 points)

5/5 Ferocity
3/3 Feral Instinct
3/3 Thick Hide
2/2 Feral Swiftness
1/1 Faerie Fire (Feral)
3/3 Sharpened Claws
2/2 Shredding Attacks
3/3 Predatory Strikes
2/2 Primal Fury
2/2 Primal Precision
2/2 Savage Fury
1/1 Feral Charge
5/5 Heart of the Wild
3/3 Survival of the Fittest
1/1 Leader of the Pack
2/2 Improved Leader of the Pack
3/3 King of the Jungle
3/3 Infected Wounds
1/1 Mangle
3/3 Improved Mangle
1/1 Berserk

Restoration (10 points)

5/5 Furor
5/5 Naturalist

More importantly, here's what's been skipped:

Feral Aggression
Brutal Impact
Primal Tenacity
Nurturing Instinct
Predatory Instincts
Rend and Tear
Omen of Clarity
Natural Shapeshifter
Master Shapeshifter

Let's go over each talent and see why it was picked.

First off, the easy ones - the ones that didn't change (or their base ability didn't change:
Ferocity
Thick Hide
Feral Swiftness
Sharpened Claws ( a prereq for primal precision)
Feral Faerie Fire
Primal Fury
Heart of the Wild
Leader of the Pack and Improved Leader of the Pack
Mangle

All of those are mostly straightforward for tanking and are pretty much a requirement for tanking. You might quibble with faerie fire, but I use this so often personally that it might as well be a requirement.


Now, the things that are changed or that have competition (and thus were not taken):
Feral Aggression, even with the buffs to ferocious bite, is still not particularly good. Demo roar still is not as good as demo shout, and ferocious bite isn't good even with full buffs like rend and tear. Skip it.

Brutal Impact is nice to have but does nothing for most encounters save M'uru adds. Skip.

Feral Instinct isn't the best talent, though it's very good and exceptional for keeping multiple mobs tanked. This combined with 4pT6 will make swipe by far the best threat talent to spam. I think with this alone it'll be better than lacerate is.

shredding attacks could be cut in favor of all sorts of other abilities. It's unclear whether cat dps would be so horribly nerfed by the lack of OoC that it wouldn't be worth it to even try. I'm assuming that some cat DPS would like to be done. They do offer some wiggle room though, so think about this when you're doing your bear's spec.

Predatory Strikes got even better, increasing the AP of your weapon by 20%. And of course it's a prereq for Heart of the Wild.

Primal Precision is the biggest improvement to threat that a bear can take for two points. This is expertise skill, not rating, which means these two points reduce parries by 2.5% and dodges by 2.5% - or, essentially, increasing your total threat by 5% while helping out with mitigation. If you have a ton of expertise on gear this might want to be cut, but I don't see how you'd get it.

Savage Fury doesn't help claw and rake anymore. Instead, it helps both flavors of mangle and maul. A huge threat boost for the two points.

Not that you would have skipped Feral charge anyway, but it also has a cat version.

Nurturing Instinct got nerfed anyway, but you simply don't have the points to get it any more. Too bad; I liked having it when healing on Bloodboil and Illidan.

Survival of the Fittest was also a must-have, but now it removes any need for any resilience or defense on gear. This alone is going to boost feral druid tanking by quite a bit, given all the itemization that can be otherwise freed up.

Primal Tenacity was always mediocre, but now that it only reduces duration instead of giving a flat resist it's much worse. And we don't have the points to spare.

King of the Jungle is essential for cat energy (and makes Tiger's Fury awesome!) but will also add a nice threat boost when enraged, helping out early on fights for snap aggro. Not essential, but nice for both cat and bear. And I wanted to play with it some.

Predatory Instincts was...tough to cut. 10% crit damage is a big deal for cats or bears, and the aoe avoidance was nice if erratic. The problem is that it's simply not as good as Naturalist. I could see a reasonable argument to take this instead of shredding attacks and King of the Jungle, and clearly this would be better for bears than shredding attacks/KotJ is. But again - trying to make a build that will allow good tanking and good dpsing.

Infected Wounds is another iffy one. I am assuming it will work on all bosses the same way thunderclap does. (This isn't currently the case on the beta servers, but I can hope, right? Thanks anon) If that's not the case, this can be skipped entirely. Otherwise it's very useful and helps out quite a bit when a warrior can't tclap for you for whatever reason.

Improved Mangle is another big boost for bear threat, effectively increasing mangle threat by 33%. It will take the place of a swipe/lacerate in the cycle, though, so it's not perfect, but it will definitely be a threat boost. The cat mangle cost reduction will help a lot with farming and somewhat on damage. This might not be as good as predatory strikes; I need to work the math out on that a bit more.

Rend and Tear is simply not enough of a boost to anything. The ferocious bite bonus is great for farming but not useful enough for raiding. The maul boost, even assuming 80% of your damage was in mauls, is not as good as predatory strikes or naturalist. Same goes for shreds.

Berserk is just too fun, and is that ohshit button that bears have been asking for for years. It isn't essential - and if you do want to do max dps as a cat, this isn't for you. (I'll be doing that build tomorrow). But for tanking? Oh yes, please.

Furor is mostly for cat regen; powershifting is ridiculously powerful in wotlk because of it. Any serious cat dps must have this. The tanking aspect isn't so special, but that's okay.

Naturalist is one of the better threat talents a bear has. Pity it's in the resto tree. It's good for cat and bear. It's not a pure 10% threat boost, but it's pretty close, and it does help with cat quite a bit.

For a pure bear build with no interest in going cat, I would go with something like this. Which I don't think is all that interesting, but some folks would want it. More overall threat, a bit more non-dependable mitigation. But no versatility.

Check back tomorrow for the cat build. Weird.