Feral PvP

[Elessa]

Hello,

I have recently dinged 80 with my Druid, and I want to start PvPing as feral. I have looked around but I can't find any guide for Feral PvP.
I am mainly looking for a BG spec, but also for a spec that would work in 2v2 with a healer as my teammate.
Some tips or strats for Feral PvP is very appreciated as I am completely new to feral PvP.

Armory if it matters http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...ider&cn=Lolcow
My mainspec is Feral tank, so I won't be getting any sick pve gear that I can use in pvp.

[Deleted]

Gem agility.

this could be a specc

[Elessa]

Gem agility.

this could be a specc

Thanks, what glyphs would I use with that spec?
Also, why don't you take improved mangle? 6 less energy on the main attack seems pretty good.

[Deleted]

Thanks, what glyphs would I use with that spec?
Also, why don't you take improved mangle? 6 less energy on the main attack seems pretty good.

Well, it's about choices. Getting less dmg taken is just more me than more dps is. Choose yourself.

About glyphs. Shred, mangle and rip/berserk seems like the way to go. I don't really think the SR glyph is a good choice, feel free to discuss.

[Woogs]

That's the spec I use, except I throw that extra point in Protector of the Pack instead of Primal Precision.

Mangle shouldn't be your main attack; you should only use it for the bleed debuff. Use shred for your main attack and to keep Infected Wounds up.

For glyphs, I use: barkskin, frenzied regen, and savage roar. Savage roar is a must, the other two are questionable. I like survivability and I only play battlegrounds.

Robinhoodexe, I'm pretty sure that the savage roar glyph will net you the most DPS out of all the glyphs. It's a 3% DPS increase, you should always have savage roar up.

[Deleted]

Mangle shouldn't be your main attack; you should only use it for the bleed debuff. Use shred for your main attack and to keep Infected Wounds up.

Mate, it's nearly impossible to get behind to shred. Mangle will be your main attack. Glyph of mangle is imo the best one barkskin ain't bad either, but fenrized regen? w00t?

[Woogs]

If you are not using shred in PvP then you are not playing at your max potential. I have no problems at all getting shreds off. It does take practice, but really it is not that hard if you have keybindings and some common sense.

As I said before, I only play battlegrounds. I choose survivability over damage on minor choices.

[Elessa]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I've found that its very hard to use shred sometimes, especially since I always seem to be focused down. That's why I thought mangle should be my main attack. Might just be because the lack of resillience.
Glyph of shred and rip seems very bad for battlegrounds since most targets die rather quick.

Looking for tips and tricks aswell, and strats for classes and how to counter them

[Woogs]

Basics:
- Keybind everything.
- Know your own and enemy cooldowns.
- Learn the basic spell priority. [Savage Roar > Rip > Ferocious Bite] > Rake > Mangle > Shred (Rake and Mangle position can be argued.)

Tips:
- Make sure you using all your Predator's Swiftness (if you can afford the mana cost) for Healing Touch, Regrowth, Cyclone, or an occasional Hibernate if you catch a ghost wolf or druid.
- You will ALMOST always want to use Survival Instincts and Frenzied Regeneration together.
- You will ALMOST always want to use Berserk after an opener, using Tiger's Fury right before to start Berserk with a good size energy pool.
- Leatherworking, engineering, and Free Action Potions are a lot of fun in battlegrounds. (Drums of Panic, Drums of Speed, and bombs)
- If you are night elf, make sure you use shadowmeld for more than just a re-stealth. It is a target drop also and can help you when running away, or as a ghetto interrupt.

Tricks:
- Cyclone players during resource gains. (Shadowfiend, Innervate)
- Death Knight - When you try to run from a DK, they will Chains of Ice spam you and then Death Grip when you are close to out of their range. If you know this is coming then you can Nature's Grasp his ghoul that is on you, wait for the Death Grip, and then charge the ghoul to get away again.
- Warlock - If you don't need a Predator's Swiftness proc to heal, then you can cyclone their pet and remove Soul Link while their pet is banished.

That's all I got for now.

[scorch109]

Part of being good at feral pvp is getting behind to shred and using shred spec, but thats mainly arenaish stuff. in bg's yeah you will generally mangle more and that means swapping to a glyph of mangle might not be a terrible idea.

[Elessa]

This is great advice, please keep it coming. Does anyone know any great feral pvp video with battlegrounds and/or 2v2 with a healer? Would be really nice if anyone could link it.

---------- Post added 2010-07-18 at 03:32 AM ----------

Basics:
1 Know your own and enemy cooldowns.

2 Learn the basic spell priority. [Savage Roar > Rip > Ferocious Bite] > Rake > Mangle > Shred (Rake and Mangle position can be argued.)

1 Is there any addon that tracks my enemies cooldowns? I find it rather hard to keep track of their cooldowns and mine at the same time by only watching their buffs/animations.

2 What addon do you use for Savage Roar, Rip and Rake timers? I always mess up when I try to watch the debuffs or my buffs, it takes focus away from the play.

[Woogs]

This is great advice, please keep it coming. Does anyone know any great feral pvp video with battlegrounds and/or 2v2 with a healer? Would be really nice if anyone could link it.

---------- Post added 2010-07-18 at 03:32 AM ----------



1 Is there any addon that tracks my enemies cooldowns? I find it rather hard to keep track of their cooldowns and mine at the same time by only watching their buffs/animations.

2 What addon do you use for Savage Roar, Rip and Rake timers? I always mess up when I try to watch the debuffs or my buffs, it takes focus away from the play.

For cooldown tracking there is: Afflicted, AESA, or WOOGLED. I use WOOGLED; I wrote it. :P

For timers I use BadKitty.

[Deleted]

Fortexorcist is good

[Zibeline]

ok, so I have recently (in fact yesterday) restarted 2s arena. I haven't played a lot due to the fact that it is very difficult to find a decent partner who both can regulary play and want to do 2s over 3s. Here are the result of yesterday matches, firsts arenas with my feral since months. I hope it will help you a bit to know how to play feral + heal.

First know that 99% of your victories will depend of your teammate, yes your are doing the damages, but even if he here to heal and support you, you wont be able to land a kill without his help. So choose wisely your mate, I advice you a good friend who do well in PvP or a gladiator who know his job, other randoms will get frustated by this team (personal xp ^^). Priorities a DPriest over the other healers. Shaman is good, it has totems, a good cc on cd and and interrupts, better regen than the priest, but it lacks of burst and sinergy with your classe, still Sham feral will beat Priest-Feral^^.

We are playing at 2k1+ mmr with no main set wrathfull gear (in fact my priest only have the r1 weap) and made a nice 5-2, losing the first game (we never played together and didn't even did skirmishes before rated arenas) against Mage-Priest, but both mage and priest where oom and my priest raged of the way he played.
We lost the third game against Unholy DK + Enh Shammy, they mount-rushed + grip the priest. If I could have seen that the shammy was Enh early I wouldnt have let him get on the priest so easely and blow him up with dispel, stun and strangulate, If we had faced this team a second time we would have surely win.

Otherwise, we won against
1x Mage+Dpriest (the one we had lost to in the first game), by tunneling mage with dispels and insane damages, 2 ice block + PS and then dead.
2x Against Holy pal + Unholy DK, first by getting a nice fear + cyclone and killing the DK, second time by ooming and killing the pal (was still the same team)
1x Dpriest + Retry with Shadowmourn, ooming priest, ccing the maximum the pal and timing the innervate with los and cyclone to avoid dispel.
1x Holy pal + arme War with lol 38k hp (easy team, we are a counter comp if the priest knows his job), kite and kill war + cc pal.

Here are the few macro I use, they are not lolol macro, but very usefull ones who save some place for keybinding..

This will put you in bear for if you arent in and charge the mouseover target :

#showtooltip Feral Charge - Bear
/cast [nostance:1] !Dire Bear Form
/cast [stance:1,target=mouseover] Feral Charge - Bear

This macro will put you in cat form if not already in, and cast prowl if not steathed, if stealthed it will cast pounce (as you may have seen it, we dont have a second stealthed barre like rogues) :

#showtooltip [stealth] Pounce; Prowl
/cast [nostance:3] !Cat Form
/cast [stealth] Pounce; [nostealth] !Prowl

And the very old but so usefull snare breaker macro :

/cast [stance:1] !Dire Bear Form; [stance:4] !Travel form; [stance:3] !Cat Form

I may have done some mistakes because I wrote then from memory, but I abused from then yesterday evening and the do realy work.


I see that some are telling you to use mangle as main attack. Realy bad idea, only use mangle to apply the bleed debuff and infected wounds if you are sure you wont be able to land a shred. with Infected Wounds you should always be able to land a shred every 4 sec. Shred is your bread and butter.

Only land a Ferocious Bite if you are sure you will kill the enemy or will crit for insane damages and make them panick (like 8k+ on mages 1k2 resi). You may also land a FB even if you are at 60+ energy if SV and RIP have still a long time if you realy need an instant cycloe now, otherwise juste refresh SV to get instant if you have nothing else to cast, yes clipping SV is good

SUPER TIP : when you are a 0 energy in cat, do not wait for energy, go bear charge in, stun some body, cyclone, well do something usefull and then land back in to cat form with 80+ energy and go back to your target. This will optimise your damages and control, way more than tunneling a target and cycloning the healer. This may be obvious, but a very few do it, and even less manage it well.

Gear :

Get full PvP gear, aim for 1200 resi. Gem agi if you dont have DBW or Sharpened scale, if you do and can run witn 40% passive arp, go for it. (I run agi just because I have everything in PVE exept and arp trinket....)
Agi set : red 20agi, yellow 10agi + 10 resi, or 10agi + 10 crit, or 10agi + 10 hit or 20hit/20 resi. Blue : 25 spell pen.
Arp set : red/yellow : 20arp. Blue : 25spell pen.

Aim for 75 spell pen and 164 hit.

I personaly run with 4relentless + 1 furious mainset, full wrathfull off set, ashen verdict ring, LDW's trinket and a 277 pve weap. I cant afford getting more PVE because I have low Ilvl on pvp set.

Glyphs : Rip, SV/Mangle , Berserker.


Add ons I use : Gladius, Pitbull, Grid and Domino. I dont realy need Afflicted as I look at my own cd time to calculate the others.

There are no strats against specifics classes, but strats against specifics teams. I have all the theory in the head for each strat against each possible 2s team, but you'd better ask for a specific team, because I wont write for all.

And sadly for you, arenajunkies wont help because all they do in the druid forum when they speak of feral is posting things like : "Why do I get globaled by casters?" "BLIZZ, Feral needs a survival buffs" or "Dont play feral, it sucks, its bad, spellcleaves will rape you."

Thank you for reading my epic english.

[Deleted]

Since you were asking for some videos, I'll recommend some from what I can remember (I'm still at work, have 'em on harddrive at home).
Note that among those enlisted here are arena videos aswell as bg-zerg videos, but I think they're fun to watch/somewhat useful either way. And you're gonna be able to see some of the big crits you can look forward to

-StormFury 2: The Prophecy
-Sint's 5: Faceroll
-How to Feral 1/2 by Starmist
-Sonny5

[AllmailenhancementJR]

I also have just recently started to pvp and I am currently doing BG to get some furious as a starter kit. I have found some useful videos. Zybaktv, he is a feral druid and he has videos on howto play feral and the strays for 3's. As for 2's it's kinda hard to find good videos or strats. Zybak and Miirkat are both really good a feral, different play styles. Miirkat play w/o Mangle and zybak plays with. Both do well but it is preference and also depends on how your comp wants to play. For all offensive Feral drop impMangle and go shred spec. Also make sure to utilize your insta-clones on heals. It's works great in BG too. Gem for ago to survive gem arp to hit a lot harder. For BG use Agi, IMO. For 3's I hear kitty cleave is great. Anyways look into Zybaktv he also has posts that have comprehensive macros and UI's. GL and HF!! It's gonna take a lot of practice!!!
P.S. Open with berserk if you can. FB is only if you can kill. BG don't try to fight more than one... Most likely gonna lose lol

[Elessa]

Thanks for the advice guys, I've gotten the answers I was looking for, but if you have anything else to add, feel free to do so

[Zibeline]

Other tips : never go bear form, unless to charge, stun and shout. Bear form in all the other cases, like tanking, U S E L E S S. Think of trading 20% more healing + instant cc + 145% moovment speed + 30% damages reduction when stunned + pressure against + little hp and armor ? You dont have any issues against physicals damages as a cat, your real problem is casters. Bear form doesnt protects you from casters.

Once you get the first instant tick of penance, you can LOS your priest, as it is a channeling spell it will continue healing you trough pillards.


Today : some tips against Rogue-Priest and Rogue-Frost mage.

Here are the comps that will easely get you in trouble if you play feral-Dpriest :

Envrogue + Dpriest :

Play offensive 100% of the time or you will lose.

You want to open the priest asap and make sure your priest doesn't get sapped. But if he gets sapped (something that nearly always happens as the other priest doesnt rush), you'd better run and pounce the other priest before he starts putting your priest naked. If you get sapped, I hope your priest is still mounted...

Nobody sapped > priest sapped > feral sapped
Rogue on feral > rogue on priest

If you don't die within 2 min (when the rogues has blown up his double evasion, vanish sprint and everything) your chances to win increase incredibly. Most of the time it will be a mana war (if you can survive the opening), and you should always win (because of innervate and the way priest heals) unless you are outplayed and constently playing on the deffensive.

This is what you do not whant to happen :

Your priest gets sapped, you are not enough speedy to open the priest before he starts dispelling your priest. The rogues opens your priest without shield and POM. The priest only spam dispells your priest because you failed puttin pressure on one of them. Result : your priest dies in 10 sec, even with 3k5 spell and 28k hp and 1k3 resi.

You are so shitty with pressure on the rogue/priest that the priest can throw 2-3 manaburns on your priest before having to heal his rogue/himself, this may often happen during evasion. This is why you should focus priest and cyclon rogue but before everything else, make your priest have a good positioning !!

Your priest got greedy with manaburns and/or assist and got killed.

As you can see it, this is one of the rare comps where a lot if the winning deppends of you. You have to force the other priest to fear your damages and deturn his attention from manaburning and dispelling.




Rogue-Frost Mage (the arcane mage version should'nt be a probleme if you properly open on the mage)

If the team knows its job, they will both stealth, try to find you, if they cant they will sap your priest and again try to fin you. If you get sapped, bye bye. You may lose because you got focused while your priest was sheeped, blinded, CSed, couldnt land any fear and you couldn't builde any instant cast. Be sure that the rogue will trinket the first cyclone, hopping his mage will do his best to prevent the priest to come enough close for a fear on boths.

Just know that your priest will 99% of the time get sapped and they will focus you. So open the mage at 50% of the sap and make sure you are far from your priest (the rogue will have to choose between resaping and CSing you). Only Interrupt the sheeps on the priest, unless he says he will handle the first with SDW. Trinket KS and ask your priest to only dispell DF on you and spam dispell the mage (when he is not spaming heals). Your priest must save his trinket for blind. If you get blinded, ask your priest to hug you, so the mage will have to think before using Nova. Try to sometime hard cast cyclones/roots (when you cant be stunned) to get Counterspelled, so your priest can safely heal.

Uses instant casts to interrupt sheeps and cc the rogue. Uses charge on cooldown after blink (both have the same CD).

A good stratedy to win is to bleed the rogue and let your priest finish him with dots and pet while you do your best to mitigate damages. Other wise you can maintain an infected wounds on the rogue and kite him while getting on the mage. Also kill pet if you can (often the pet is on you and you can los the mage, while still dpsing the pet).

But dont expect winning this comp before facing it a lot of time.