BERSERK!!!

[Nightcrowler]

1) Feral Faerie Fire becomes a core ability.
2) Brutal Impact increases duration and lowers cooldown of Bash. It swaps with Savage Fury, mostly to keep it out of the paws of anyone but Ferals.
3) Feral Faerie Fire replaced with the old Last Stand component of Berserk. But it's usable in both cat and bear forms.
4) Cat Berserk does not change. Bear Berserk goes back to Mangle hitting 3 targets, and since that isn't so useful on single targets, it also removes the 6 sec (untalented) cooldown of Mangle during the 15 sec duraton for some nice bear burst or threat generation. The Fear immunity is still intact.

From: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...=2000&pageNo=3

[Heijaangel]

That sounds real sweet ;D

[Koumaru]

It looks nice in list form and all, but it seems like it's going to cause more talent bloat for tanking specs and not much else.

1) The bear tanking buff to Feral Faerie Fire was enough in and of itself to make it a worthy 1-point talent. But this change leads to change #3, so I'm all for it.

2) Very nice for interrupt purposes, but it's a 2-point talent. No room to take it in a tanking build. Yay for bloat!

3) Okay, Last Stand on its own button and cooldown. Very nice.

4) The new Berserk sounds "fun" as they promised it would be, but really doesn't address any bear tanking issues. It's more threat on a few targets that we could tank very easily already. What it is NOT is Damage Shield or Holy Shield. We'll be capable of massive burst threat on three targets, and we'll still be the worst AoE tanks in the game.

[1sickpuppy]

I hope they just merge Faerie Fire and Faerie Fire(Feral) as one spell, usable in all forms like what they did to Barkskin.

[Sulika]

2) Very nice for interrupt purposes, but it's a 2-point talent. No room to take it in a tanking build. Yay for bloat!

It has been stated many times, the feral tree is intended to be more bloated than the other class trees because it basically has to be able to accomodate both DPS and Tanking. It is not intended that a feral druid can simultaneously be very good at both of those roles. The bloat is very deliberate and the only way that feral can be viable both as raid DPS and as a Tank is if the talent tree bloat prevents ferals from being both at the same time. So instead of having one cat tree and one bear tree you get a single bloated feral tree.

[albedo]

The new Berserk sounds "fun" as they promised it would be, but really doesn't address any bear tanking issues. It's more threat on a few targets that we could tank very easily already. What it is NOT is Damage Shield or Holy Shield.

They should add damages to Thorns. (in tick hide talent : "Thorns deals 50/100/150% additionnal bleeding damages for 9 seconds. stackable).


Last Stand instead of FFF? Why not, but we'll use barkskin 100 more times. I would prefer a one-point talent that allows to use all instants in ferals forms. (and yes, bye last stand)

Talking about the "fun" of bearserk, we are far behind protection warriors shockwave and catserk's "adrenaline rush" seems a bit OP to my mind and will be nerfed. To make it short, berserk should be replaced by an aoe ability in bear and dps boost in cat. (a bleed divided by up to 3 targets in front of you in bear and 3 consecutives strikes on a single target for 1.5 sec in cat ala "Claw Rage" Zuljin lynx form).

A very easy way to boost our initial aoe tanking would be to apply infected wounds with swipe dealing adittionnal aggro as thunderclap.

Another very simple thing to do : boost lacerate damage. (stackable only 3 times but longer dots?)

PoTP is a weird but usefull damage reduction and Rend and Tear a dps boost noone really likes. They should merge it to a single 5 points talent that increase bleeding damages by 10% in cat and decrease the damage taken by 10% in bear when the target suffer for 2 or more bleeds.

[Koumaru]

It has been stated many times, the feral tree is intended to be more bloated than the other class trees because it basically has to be able to accomodate both DPS and Tanking.

This is all fine and dandy, but how is it relevant to bloat in a pure tanking build? I'm not trying to be both bear and cat. In fact, back in the post-1.8 days, but before 2.0.3 (the pre-BC talent patch), there already was a bit more of a dividing line between bear and cat spec, which 2.0.3 completely erased.

I was a bear druid in 1.8. I'm a cat in TBC only when needed and have no intention of speccing for cat dps in 3.0.2 or beyond.

The problem is that they're adding more and more and more and more bear talents to the tree for us to pick and choose. At the same time they're telling prot warriors that they want to reduce bloat to allow them to pick more "fun" talents.

I can make a cat dps spec and have points left over. Bear spec is bloated as hell, and the bloat is growing.

This has nothing to do with cat spec or attempts to achieve a cat/bear hybrid spec that performs both roles optimally. The kind of bloat that encourages role specialization is indeed a good thing.

It's also a different thing.

This bloat is having to spend almost all of your talent points on must-have core tanking talents, and then decide which copies of abilities other tanks have had for ages to spend the last few points on, just so you can end up with similar avoidance, inferior mitigation (lack of block), and less than half as many utility abilities.

Now they want us to spend two talent points to get a core warrior ability (shield bash) on a cooldown that's five times as long. We've already accepted spending 3 talent points on an inferior clone of defensive stance. Sure, ours doesn't lower our damage output. But it doesn't do anything at all outside of a group, so who cares?

My warrior alt is level 17 and counting.

[rimmer]

the bloat is intended, blizz would prefer it that there was a hard choice between talents. The intention is that you can get all the main mitigation and threat talents, but have to make your own decision on what "extras" to take.
Cookie cutter specs = no diversity.

Warr prot specs are very similar in this regards, havent paid any attention to palas tho. Dk might as well randomly spend 71 talent points by smashing there head on the keyboard for all i can see.

[Koumaru]

The tree fails as a tanking tree.

The multi-purpose, hybrid nature of most feral talents (and really just a lot of druid talents in general) gives them too little talent budget to accomidate the needs of a specialized role.

We're moving into an age of more and more specialization. Most of our talents are still two-sided (bear and cat), so the benefit per talent point is pretty lackluster.

Yes, Blizzard has stated that some bloat is intentional, and that they want players to have to make choices. They have also stated, however, that they're aware that some talents are mandatory no-brainers, and are trying to reduce that problem to allow for more choice and less cookie-cutter spec selection.

This bloat has us picking up a huge list of must-haves, all at a premium talent point cost due to the hybrid design of our talents, so we can make a couple of choices with one or two talent points on what utilities to pick up to narrow the gap between bears and other tanks.

The new ridiculously expensive "shield bash" talent is just another warrior utility power being waved in our faces that no real bear tanking spec can possibly afford to pick up. Where's the choice there? Huh?

The feral tree is a talent budget nightmare of hybrid crap.

[Aureoloss]

theyre not going to give swipe infected wounds. swipe has no cd, so dont compare it to thunderclap cause thats not how it works.

thunderclap
Blasts nearby enemies increasing the time between their attacks by 10% for 30 sec and doing 300 damage to them. Damage increased by attack power. This ability causes additional threat and will affect up to 4 targets.
20 Rage, Instant, 6 sec cooldown

swipe
Swipe 4 nearby enemies, inflicting 108 damage. Damage increased by attack power.
20 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant

imagine adding infected wounds onto swipe. a mage without omen would never be a problem again, since the mob would just very slowly walk towards them. people would just spam swipe and not worry about anything else.

[albedo]

theyre not going to give swipe infected wounds. swipe has no cd, so dont compare it to thunderclap cause thats not how it works.

thunderclap
Blasts nearby enemies increasing the time between their attacks by 10% for 30 sec and doing 300 damage to them. Damage increased by attack power. This ability causes additional threat and will affect up to 4 targets.
20 Rage, Instant, 6 sec cooldown

swipe
Swipe 4 nearby enemies, inflicting 108 damage. Damage increased by attack power.
20 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant

imagine adding infected wounds onto swipe. a mage without omen would never be a problem again, since the mob would just very slowly walk towards them. people would just spam swipe and not worry about anything else.

"Infected swipe" would get a 6 sec cd and would work as an initial aggro ability.