Feral Druids - the Bear guide

[nrross]

Yes, my boots lol, I really wasn't sure what to do about those. Thanks for the boot suggestion, I think I will start working on that, thanks guys. Yea, still working on the T8 emblem chest.

[axxey]

I was wondering about King of the Jungle, and Feral Tank.

I am planing to change my talent to with King of the Jungle

This is my druid, Auroro.

King of the Jungle and Shredding Attacks are THE cat talents to pick up if you want to be a useful druid the parts of a fight when you're not tanking.

[iamsamo9724]

how much health and dodge would i need to tank 10 uldaur

[arel00]

how much health and dodge would i need to tank 10 uldaur

Over 40% dodge with over 40k hp. Raidbuffed, that is. This can be achieved with Naxx25 level gear, so it's not hard these days with all the emblems going around.
You can probably tank TotC10 too with those stats.

[iamsamo9724]

What about 25 uldaur?

[Auroro]

King of the Jungle and Shredding Attacks are THE cat talents to pick up if you want to be a useful druid the parts of a fight when you're not tanking.

King of the Jungle is a talent that is both Bear and Cat talent.

King of the Jungle give Enrage another bonus when use, 15% more damage done when in bear form. That give 2.5% more threat.

Damages:
King of the Jungle: 15%
Naturalist: 10%

Attack Power:
Predatory Strikes: 150% of your lvl
Predatory Strikes: 20% more from weapon
Protector of the Pack: 6%

Swipe: AOE
Feral Instinct: Swipe deal 30% more damage

Now, if I do Enrage and Swipe, the damage is 45% more damage. That is a lot for an AOE.

Where is the shredding attack you point out I do not see it.

[numufu]

King of the Jungle is a talent that is both Bear and Cat talent.

King of the Jungle give Enrage another bonus when use, 15% more damage done when in bear form. That give 2.5% more threat.

Damages:
King of the Jungle: 15%
Naturalist: 10%

Attack Power:
Predatory Strikes: 150% of your lvl
Predatory Strikes: 20% more from weapon
Protector of the Pack: 6%

Swipe: AOE
Feral Instinct: Swipe deal 30% more damage

Now, if I do Enrage and Swipe, the damage is 45% more damage. That is a lot for an AOE.

Where is the shredding attack you point out I do not see it.

King of the Jungle is only effective when you use Enrage. You must understand that Enrage has a CD, whereas Naturalist gives you the 10% all of the time, not waiting for the CD of Enrage. In my opinion, I would rather have 10% bonus damage 100% of the time rather than 15% damage bonus waiting for my Enrage CD. Also, Shredding Attacks is the fourth tier of Feral abilities on the far left, and if you spec both talents into it, it reduces the rage cost of your Lacerate ability by 2 and energy cost of your Shred by 18 - that is most definitely more of a cat ability.

[getefix]

KotJ is not even close to a replacement for Naturalist. Some people prefer it to NSS and MSS, but I don't. Some people also prefer Imp Mangle but I don't find it necessary.

[Auroro]

King of the Jungle is only effective when you use Enrage. You must understand that Enrage has a CD, whereas Naturalist gives you the 10% all of the time, not waiting for the CD of Enrage. In my opinion, I would rather have 10% bonus damage 100% of the time rather than 15% damage bonus waiting for my Enrage CD. Also, Shredding Attacks is the fourth tier of Feral abilities on the far left, and if you spec both talents into it, it reduces the rage cost of your Lacerate ability by 2 and energy cost of your Shred by 18 - that is most definitely more of a cat ability.

I did not put any point in Shredding Attacks. Did you look at my char page where there is two Spec, Feral DPS, and Feral Tank. (You need to know the different)

I post Auroro's idea

The CD is 1 minute, that is nothing when you are tanking a boss. I sometime get 3 enrage in one boss fight.

Infected Wounds is getting a buff in 3.2.2, I am think of putting some point there.

I wish Blizzard remove Feral Charge from the talent tree. It is the oddball in the tree.

[Sunshine]

The CD is 1 minute, that is nothing when you are tanking a boss. I sometime get 3 enrage in one boss fight.

Sure, you get 15% for 10 seconds per minute. That just means it's much different than 15% all the time (like naturalist's 10% all the time). It should be roughly equivalent to a 0.25% increase in damage overall ([1.15 * 10 + 1 * 50] / 60). Granted, you can do something special during that time to get more damage (berserk once every 3 enrages, for example), but I don't think it's major. You're also hurting yourself by lowering your armor (which is fine on some fights, but not so fine on others).

Infected Wounds is getting a buff in 3.2.2, I am think of putting some point there.

You should have it now, for all the reasons we've discussed earlier. The buff in 3.2.2 is marginal and affects a few seconds at the beginning of the fight *only*.

I wish Blizzard remove Feral Charge from the talent tree. It is the oddball in the tree.

To become a baseline ability, or just to disappear altogether? It's a good talent. It's fun, it gives feral something unique, and it's useful to have in both cat and bear.

[arel00]

What about 25 uldaur?

5-8% more dodge, 2-3k more health to tank everything before hardmodes (and some hardmodes aswell).

[iamsamo9724]

Thanks now I've got to get my gear up lol

[gigaryzr]

okay i've read pretty much most of the post hear and i have 3 points left i'm unsure where i want to spend at, its between imp. mangle, kotj, or infected wounds, which would be more tps oriented mainly

[Sunshine]

okay i've read pretty much most of the post hear and i have 3 points left i'm unsure where i want to spend at, its between imp. mangle, kotj, or infected wounds, which would be more tps oriented mainly

You should have infected wounds. It's not a tps thing, it's a 'taking responsibility for putting up required debuffs' thing.

If you want tps, of the three, imp mangle is the best.

I'd suggest you post your spec for us to find you 3 more points for infected wounds. Or, if you only have that many points left, I suspect you have MSS, in which case your tps should be fine without imp mangle.

[gigaryzr]

You should have infected wounds. It's not a tps thing, it's a 'taking responsibility for putting up required debuffs' thing.

If you want tps, of the three, imp mangle is the best.

I'd suggest you post your spec for us to find you 3 more points for infected wounds. Or, if you only have that many points left, I suspect you have MSS, in which case your tps should be fine without imp mangle.

well i'm not lacking very bad on tps, just certain fights its harder to get threat faster than other, i have 2 different tanking spec, one is for improved mangle the other is the one of which i'm using to test and wasn't sure which points to put the 3 extra in but i was leaning toward infected wounds lol so ty for the help on that

[numufu]

I didn't feel like reading all 20 pages to get my answer, but I was just curious to know something, whether the answer be simple or complex.

Is stam stacking the way to go (depending on gear of course, please explain your reasoning. not just "because it makes you better")
I hear people on my realm always go back and forth between picking druid tanks that have absurdly large amounts of HP over one that can actually tank and has roughly around the same HP as a warrior or paladin tank. Is this because people are used to the druid tanks back in Vanilla WOW? Are druid tanks -still- supposed to have over 50k hp unbuffed? Why or why not? In my own opinion, no, and that's because of the nerfs that druid tanks have gotten over the past patches. But people tend to not understand this and continue to stam stack in order to impress themselves and others when people are looking for tanks.

It's already been said that having high stamina can be a good thing for -certain- fights, but not all. (ie Sarth 3d and some progression fights if you're absolutely clueless about them), but I would rather have 40k with 50% chance to dodge over something ridiculous like 60k with just barely 30% chance to dodge.

[Auroro]

I didn't feel like reading all 20 pages to get my answer, but I was just curious to know something, whether the answer be simple or complex.

Is stam stacking the way to go (depending on gear of course, please explain your reasoning. not just "because it makes you better")
I hear people on my realm always go back and forth between picking druid tanks that have absurdly large amounts of HP over one that can actually tank and has roughly around the same HP as a warrior or paladin tank. Is this because people are used to the druid tanks back in Vanilla WOW? Are druid tanks -still- supposed to have over 50k hp unbuffed? Why or why not? In my own opinion, no, and that's because of the nerfs that druid tanks have gotten over the past patches. But people tend to not understand this and continue to stam stack in order to impress themselves and others when people are looking for tanks.

It's already been said that having high stamina can be a good thing for -certain- fights, but not all. (ie Sarth 3d and some progression fights if you're absolutely clueless about them), but I would rather have 40k with 50% chance to dodge over something ridiculous like 60k with just barely 30% chance to dodge.

There was never any druid tanks in Vanilla WOW, every gear they got was built to be a boomkin or Resto. People start seeing Druid Tank in the middle of BC.

[Auroro]

Sure, you get 15% for 10 seconds per minute. That just means it's much different than 15% all the time (like naturalist's 10% all the time). It should be roughly equivalent to a 0.25% increase in damage overall ([1.15 * 10 + 1 * 50] / 60). Granted, you can do something special during that time to get more damage (berserk once every 3 enrages, for example), but I don't think it's major. You're also hurting yourself by lowering your armor (which is fine on some fights, but not so fine on others).

Not really, since I been getting a lot of good healer. The armor is fine while warrior get their health lower when they use their.

To become a baseline ability, or just to disappear altogether? It's a good talent. It's fun, it gives feral something unique, and it's useful to have in both cat and bear.

Baseline ability, I think blizzard should put something better talent than that.

[Sunshine]

It's already been said that having high stamina can be a good thing for -certain- fights, but not all. (ie Sarth 3d and some progression fights if you're absolutely clueless about them), but I would rather have 40k with 50% chance to dodge over something ridiculous like 60k with just barely 30% chance to dodge.

I don't think many people would go for 60k / 30%; it's just unrealistic. The debate is more like 50k / 40% vs. 40k / 50% (roughly). And you know what? I've stacked agi from the beginning of WotLK until now (being around 40k / 50% at the end of 3.1). However, I'm finding that for heroic ToC 25, I have to stack more stam than I'm used to, meaning closer to 50k / 40%. I'll still consider that a "progression" fight for now, though, since I've replaced only a few pieces of gear so far in 3.2 (damn you, RNG!).

The difference between having 50k at the beginning of WotLK and having 50k now is that before it required the polar set with full stam gems and had no agility whatsoever, making you a true sponge. Having 50k now uses real gear with high amounts of agility while preferring stam and agi/stam for sockets. It's still possible to go overboard, but at ~50k I sometimes drop to 2k during heroic beasts, so I'm pretty convinced this much hp is not going to waste.

[arel00]

I know I'll punch myself in the face by stating this but.. I found myself agreeing with stamina needs more than what I would have thought (I'm an agility lover).

Said that, it goes like this (unless you badly want to be a sponge or a rogue): one stamina trinket paired with one avoidance trinket (usually Greatness, if you can), a mixture of gems picked in between stamina, agility and agi/sta. How much to weight one or the other, depends on your gear, raid progression and, most of all, raid-player-composition, meaning I found people that liked me to dodge all the time, and other that liked me being more of a sponge.

As the last weeks went, I've switched from pure agility to Shifting Dreadstones all over the place. It brought me back a SSC feeling, but it works :P

I wouldn't say stamina is "the way to go". I'd say that pure agility is no longer "the way to go" tho. Raids seem to call for a mixture of the two.

There was never any druid tanks in Vanilla WOW, every gear they got was built to be a boomkin or Resto. People start seeing Druid Tank in the middle of BC.

I must be a ghost then. Because I happen to have tanked BWL, AQ40 and some shit in Naxx. Feral gear was there if you knew where to look. Warriors being better doesn't mean you were useless, at all.
Patchwerk was actually the reason feral tanks started to pop up in big guilds too.