Feral WoD changes

[Elunedra]

Just listing the things that currently apply to Guardian Druids and thought it would be better suited to have it's own thread to discuss the Bear changes.

THESE WILL CHANGE. CALM DOWN. SKY IS STILL KK IF THERE'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T LIKE

General Changes

• Agility no longer provides an increased chance to critically strike with melee and ranged attacks or abilities.
• The base chance to critically strike is now 5% for all classes. There are no longer different chances to critically strike with melee, ranged, and spells.
• There is a new passive, named Critical Strikes, which increases chance to critically strike by 10%. It is learned by all Rogues, all Hunters, Feral and Guardian Druids, Brewmaster and Windwalker Monks, and Enhancement Shamans.
• Each point of Agility or Strength now grants 1 Attack Power (down from 2). All other sources of Attack Power now grant half as much as before.
• Weapon Damage values on all weapons have been reduced by 20%.
• Attack Power now increases Weapon Damage at a rate of 1 DPS per 3.5 Attack Power (up from 1 DPS per 14 Attack Power).
• Attack Power, Spell Power, or Weapon Damage now affect the entire healing or damage throughput of player spells.
• The amount of Dodge gained per point of Agility has been reduced by 25%.
• All players now have a 100% chance to hit, 0% chance to be dodged, 3% chance to be parried, and 0% chance to glance, when fighting creatures up to 3 levels higher (bosses included).
• Creatures 4+ levels higher than you still have a chance to avoid your attacks in various ways, so as to discourage you from attempting to fight enemies that are much stronger than you.
• Hit and Expertise bonuses on all items and item enhancements (gems, enchants, etc.) have been converted into Critical Strike, Haste, or Mastery.

Kitty Changes

• Mangle (Cat Form) has been removed.
• Shred is now available to all Druids.
• Symbiosis has been removed.
• Druid: Faerie Fire now applies Physical Vulnerability, increasing Physical damage taken by 4% for 30 seconds.
• Druid: Thrash no longer apply the Weakened Blows effect.
• Survival Instincts is now available to all Druid specializations. Survival Instincts now reduces damage taken by 70% (up from 50%) with a 2-minute cooldown (down from 3), and for Feral and Guardian specializations can have up to 2 charges (up from 1).
• Pounce's damage has been increased by 100%.
• Primal Fury now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Druid's primary target.
• Glyph of Savagery now grants a free 5 combo point Savage Roar when leaving Prowl, instead of allowing Savage Roar to be used with 0 combo points.
• Heart of the Wild no longer provides an increase to Hit chance or Expertise while active, and no longer increases Stamina, Agility, and Intellect.
• Dream of Cenarius: Feral: Casting Healing Touch no longer increases the damage of the Druid's next 2 melee abilities, or increases the healing of Rejuvenation
• Nature's Vigil, while active, increases single-target damage and healing caused by healing spells by 16% (down from 25%), and all single-target damage spells also heal a nearby friendly target for 35% of the damage done (up from 25%).

Kitty Talents!

• Moonfire is now usable while in Cat Form, generates 1 combo point, deals damage based on attack power, and costs 30 energy.
• Thrash now also applies the Rake bleed effect to all damaged enemies and awards 1 combo point if it strikes your current combo target.
• Savage Roar is now passive.

Class Perks *These are Perks gained while leveling throughout Draenor*

• Enhanced Berserk - Your maximum energy is increased by 50 while Berserk is active.
• Enhanced Cat Form - Your movement speed in Cat Form is increased by an additional 5%.
• Enhanced Tiger's Fury - Increases the duration of Tiger's Fury by 2 sec.
• Enhanced Prowl - Removes the movement speed penalty from Prowl.
• Improved Shred - Your Shred deals 20% additional damage.
• Improved Pounce - Your Pounce deals 100% additional damage.
• Improved Ferocious Bite - Your Ferocious Bite deals 20% additional damage.
• Enhanced Rejuvenation - You can cast Rejuvenation while in Bear Form or Cat Form.
• Improved Healing Touch - Increases the healing done by your Healing Touch by 20%.

[gestapo]

Finally! A first post! Edit: Was just about to type this in, glad you did before me. On topic here are my thoughts.

1. First things first. It's not mentioned here, but I saw that rogues maybe getting CP being on the player instead of the target. Would the same happen for Feral? That would be a huge buff!

2. Overall quite liking the changes. I'd still like to see some way we can cast cyclone from form, at least while we have the PS buff active maybe.

3. Mixed feelings about the SR glyph change. On one hand having a 5cp roar is sweet, but having it only activated coming out of prowl means after the initial one it's more annoying micromanaging. However, with the glyph you can avoid the SR talent and grab moonfire or something. So do i want to moonfire in cat & manage SR, or grab the talent and save a glyph spot? From a pvp perspective I actually felt it would have been stronger if the current glyph was just made to go up to 18s instead of 12s.

4. If Shred is the new mangle is that the only thing we have for CP generation (other than rake ofc? - not including catmoonfire here)

5. Going to miss symb but the 2 charge 70% SI looks incredibly strong. We will be quite tanky again.

6. Hotw/DoC descriptions look incomplete (if not they're horrible) so will wait and see on that. Kinda sad Hotw is gutted because i like more hybrid play style.

7. Finally, so psyched for the Draenor class perks!

Enhanced Berserk - Your maximum energy is increased by 50 while Berserk is active.
Enhanced Cat Form - Your movement speed in Cat Form is increased by an additional 5%.
Enhanced Tiger's Fury - Increases the duration of Tiger's Fury by 2 sec.
Enhanced Prowl - Removes the movement speed penalty from Prowl.
Improved Shred - Your Shred deals 20% additional damage.
Improved Pounce - Your Pounce deals 100% additional damage.
Improved Ferocious Bite - Your Ferocious Bite deals 20% additional damage.
Enhanced Rejuvenation - You can cast Rejuvenation while in Bear Form or Cat Form.
Improved Healing Touch - Increases the healing done by your Healing Touch by 20%

[Elunedra]

yes class perks seem realy awsome

as for CP moves, we will have:
Shred, Rake, Pounce, Swipe,
and Primal Fury should also proc of trash

so that does mean we be mailly shred on single target and swipe / trash on multi target

as i said before i think the trasg > rake talent is a must have for aoe, but the moonfire talent is probely best single target but will give us an other dot to keep track off to increase compexity
the SR talent seems to me for noob kitty's

[Deleted]

7. Finally, so psyched for the Draenor class perks!

Enhanced Berserk - Your maximum energy is increased by 50 while Berserk is active.
Enhanced Cat Form - Your movement speed in Cat Form is increased by an additional 5%.
Enhanced Tiger's Fury - Increases the duration of Tiger's Fury by 2 sec.
Enhanced Prowl - Removes the movement speed penalty from Prowl.
Improved Shred - Your Shred deals 20% additional damage.
Improved Pounce - Your Pounce deals 100% additional damage.
Improved Ferocious Bite - Your Ferocious Bite deals 20% additional damage.
Enhanced Rejuvenation - You can cast Rejuvenation while in Bear Form or Cat Form.
Improved Healing Touch - Increases the healing done by your Healing Touch by 20%

I'm not quite sure I share the same excitement. They all see so...meh.

Enhanced Berserk seems almost pointless, ofc you energy cap during berserk but you have the more then enough energy to spend during berserk, it's not like that 50 energy stays after it ends. You are still limited by GCD at the end of the day, whether you are sat at 60 energy, 100 energy or 140 energy. If we can use TF during berserk, this might turn out to be a little better, but no word on that yet afaik.

Enhanced Cat form, 5% is ok I guess, but until we see what the increase in speed is like from the armour stat, I can't get that excited about it.

Tiger's fury one isn't bad, but with removed snap-shotting, you probably won't even notice it.

Enhanced Prowl, currently a glyph, now will be baked in.

Shred, about the only one that I see matters, this clearly seperates mangle and shred, which imo is a good thing.

Pounce, 100% buff AGAIN, what's this? the 3rd time it's had a huge buff and it's still terrible.

Ferocious Bite since we'll most likely be energy starved until a good way into WoD, I don't even see us using FB all that much, ontop of that, still hits like a wet noodle.

Rejuv, a small increase to our self heal. Nothing more to say.

Healing touch, if you are using DoC which also increases HT by 20%, we might get some nice heals, but remember a time when we use to have Natures swiftness and got an extra 50% ontop of our 20%?

To sum this up, where is the increases to our bleeds? They are what matter for a feral, unless they are taking a huge turn away from them, we should have some perks to increase rip, rake or thrash. I see none, which is massively disappointing.

[Kals]

I shall post here what I posted on the official forums on my thoughts for the level 100 changes at the very least.

On paper, in terms of PvP lv 100 talents I'll personally be trying out all 3 really.

I imagine lazerkitteh talent will be a decent choice if it feels I still need enough PS procs (via Roar) for CC and Heals in the expansion, but again due to the energy cost it will greatly depend on how well it scales with attack power and if it grants 2 CP on crit (we all know how well Deathcoil Symbiosis worked out...) Furthermore since it will be scaling off attack power will it scale with things like Tiger's Fury? I imagine not since that's technically listed as an increase to Physical Damage. These will be things to look at once we can get some testing in.

Bloody Thrash could be good for running melee cleaves (or even FPS/Feral LSD possibly), especially Kittycleave or Ebolacleave, where spread damage and mostly minimal CC is being done anyways, more-so if Thrash maintains it's decent damage thoroughput in the expansion, though if too effective I feel most teams when faced with this will make sure to stay spread at all times (more so than is already the norm), making this talent all but worthless for PvP.

Passive SR will be a tossup on if PS procs maintain their effectiveness in WoD. If offheals aren't needed as much as they currently are (which they may not be depending how well the changes are implemented) this may be the default choice for most of us allowing for more FBs/Rake/Rip spreads at the cost of ranged PS procs, pending lazerkitteh damage is not greater than what is gained from more FBs/Rake/Rip spreading.

Anyway this is all pure speculation at this point since nothing we see on paper can even close to reliably reflect what we will likely end up seeing in game once beta rolls out in the coming months.

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Enhanced Berserk seems almost pointless, ofc you energy cap during berserk but you have the more then enough energy to spend during berserk, it's not like that 50 energy stays after it ends. You are still limited by GCD at the end of the day, whether you are sat at 60 energy, 100 energy or 140 energy. If we can use TF during berserk, this might turn out to be a little better, but no word on that yet afaik.

I was also looking at this. The big question is will we be put up to 150 energy when we activate berserk, or will be still be at the same amount of energy we had when we activated it? If it's the latter this perk is damn near pointless since pooling energy in Berserk is just pointless.

[Aseyhe]

Rejuv, a small increase to our self heal. Nothing more to say.

The ability to use rejuvenation in cat form is pretty big news considering how many free global cooldowns we have. It's not just a self heal.

[Sylar Hao]

Inquisition from Retribution paladins got removed, which is awesome...
I'm disappointed they didn't remove Savage Roar or overhaul it to do something completely different. I understand we need SR because then our rotation would be way too simple, but managing a buff is not fun, like at all, specially when letting it fall means you'll be doing 40% less damage than everybody else.

Savage Roar could be an AoE finisher, or a cleaving finisher like the old Hunter Talent Lynx Rush who made their pet jump between targets and apply a bleeding effect, which got me wondering way we didn't get that at first; or an enhancer of the next cat ability used... but no, we're still stuck with a plain damage booster to line us up with others...

As for perks... they're actually things we should've had for years now, nothing special.

I find incredibly fun and interesting the new Glyph of Savagery though. And the extra Survival Instinct is a bless .

Also a little sad about Symbiosis, I really like it and it adds something unique and fun.

[Deleted]

I LOVE EVERYTHING in those changes ! Just like they read my mind! So awesome!

[Elunedra]

Shred, about the only one that I see matters, this clearly seperates mangle and shred, which imo is a good thing.

sorry to bring you the bad news but mangle (cat) is gone

[gestapo]

I disagree about the perks being mediocre. I think they're great, especially the ones that were must have like the cat form healing glyph - a bonus that the healing touch perk now gives. As mentioned, being able to rejuv in cat form is huge. I do agree that we could definitely see some perks for bleeds, being our bread and butter. I'll definitely trade the Zerk perk (ha!) for a better rake.

Speaking of rake, the thrash talent seems really underwhelming to me for pvp. Rake doesn't seem to be doing enough dmg to make the talent worthwhile. The SR talent will be terrible if we don't have any other SR like cp dump to proc PS from range. Looks like I'll have no choice but to go laserkitty. Not that i'm complaining. If they keep the energy cost manageable it would be incredibly useful. Keeping people in combat from range, generating CP from range, etc. Just seems weird, is all - a kitty firing lasers. Weird or epic. Can't decide. I think I will macro "/y Pew Pew" to Moonfire.

If we could get these three things I'd be incredibly happy:

-Druids can now cast cyclone in form (not while moving)
-Feral druids can cast cyclone while moving when the Predatory Swiftness buff is active. The buff can still be dispelled, and the cast will fail if the buff is dispelled before the cast is finished.
-Cyclone range is increased by 10 yards

[Fierae]

So, what do we use if we are attacking from the front now mangle is gone?

Or are we being forced to sit behind anyone if we want to do any damage?

[Dagzter]

So, what do we use if we are attacking from the front now mangle is gone?

Or are we being forced to sit behind anyone if we want to do any damage?

The positional requirement of Shred has been removed.

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Incidentally, has there been any clarification if the Rogue change (omitted from the patch notes but 'confirmed' on Twitter) regarding how CPs will now be built upon the player and not the target is also applicable to Ferals?

[ShmooDude]

Only stat based snapshotting is going away (attack power, haste, crit, mastery, and multistrike). Savage Roar, Tiger's Fury and any straight percent damage buffs will still be "snapshotted." This was confirmed on twitter a while back when the snapshotting thing was first announced. Same with Eclipse for Balance Druids.

[Deleted]

The positional requirement of Shred has been removed.

- - - Updated - - -

Incidentally, has there been any clarification if the Rogue change (omitted from the patch notes but 'confirmed' on Twitter) regarding how CPs will now be built upon the player and not the target is also applicable to Ferals?

I still hope it's coming to ferals too. It would be a huge buff and make life so much better. I'm not saying that I hate target switch fights, but I hate target switch fights.

Also I somehow don't like the idea of getting a new DoT to manage, but well, since I got free spots on my bars from mangle and symb I'll have room for it. (Give beta)

[Elunedra]

If we could get these three things I'd be incredibly happy:

-Druids can now cast cyclone in form (not while moving)
-Feral druids can cast cyclone while moving when the Predatory Swiftness buff is active. The buff can still be dispelled, and the cast will fail if the buff is dispelled before the cast is finished.
-Cyclone range is increased by 10 yards

its hard enough to perfectly perform the somatic components of a spell while standing still, its even harder todo for a feral druid whi stands on 4 legs, its totaly imposable to move along with it

[Skadovsk]

It's all crap, most of the passives already existed at some point, so not even being creative here.
Only cool thing is rejuv in cat, which tbh its crap outside HotW for raid healing, and now we have a confirmation that DoC is gone... so jesus what the hell are we gonna do now, not even a hint about changing how we will work.
No mentioning about what they're gonna do at all to make up for snapshot loss, that "super awesome 100% buff" we saw on twitter was another pointless buff to a useless ability, we were expecting FB buffs or something but nope, for all we know they really have no clue what to do with feral.
Should probably start one of those beta threads on official forums like the "Removng NS is retarded" one, I don't feel like keeping 3 dots up with no additional mechanics at all the entire expac.

"B-but its just alpha" we know blizzard has the balls to let a spec stay shitty like this for entire expacs.

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It's all crap, most of the passives already existed at some point, so not even being creative here.
Only cool thing is rejuv in cat, which tbh its crap outside HotW for raid healing, and now we have a confirmation that DoC is gone... so jesus what the hell are we gonna do now, not even a hint about changing how we will work.
No mentioning about what they're gonna do at all to make up for snapshot loss, that "super awesome 100% buff" we saw on twitter was another pointless buff to a useless ability, we were expecting FB buffs or something but nope, for all we know they really have no clue what to do with feral.
Should probably start one of those beta threads on official forums like the "Removng NS is retarded" one, I don't feel like keeping 3 dots up with no additional mechanics at all the entire expac.

"B-but its just alpha" we know blizzard has the balls to let a spec stay shitty like this for entire expacs.

[Deleted]

The positional requirement of Shred has been removed.

- - - Updated - - -

Incidentally, has there been any clarification if the Rogue change (omitted from the patch notes but 'confirmed' on Twitter) regarding how CPs will now be built upon the player and not the target is also applicable to Ferals?

i seriously hope this is the case. Is it confirmed that rogues are getting this? Because is so, theres no way in hell ferals wont get it.

[Kojo]

It's not confirmed since the whole idea is still sitting on the table, but if they do it then yeah they said feral benefits too.

[Dagzter]

i seriously hope this is the case. Is it confirmed that rogues are getting this? Because is so, theres no way in hell ferals wont get it.

'Confirmed' in as much as they are definitely trying it out with a view to full implementation: https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...96688609734656

[Delekii]

There is no UNIVERSE in which they move rogue cp to player and not feral. If rogue gets it, feral will get it.