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I always thought it was magiclly thorwing the power of weeds at targets
I gave up on healing on my druid after the nightmare of death knight tanks {I still have flash backs and dread seeing death knights tank when I que as a healer on my paladin and priests}
Bear tanking isn't changed much. You stack your Lacerates for Pulverize and you Mangle whenever it's possible. Maul is off the GCD, so just press it when you have rage. (keep up demo roar and FFF obviously, but FFF isn't worth pushing anymore for threat). If you have spare GCDs/rage, then Thrash is pretty good. For AoE tanking just use Thrash and Swipe as it has always been.
They changed the tank CDs, but you can just read the tooltips to get that. Note that Enrage has no drawback anymore, so you can use it on every pull.
I have no idea about Resto.
Hm, glad and sad to hear about kitty dps, at least you knew who knew the class.
Thanks for the info though!
I should probably just replace it with MoP stuff.
How is bear threat these days? Easy? Hard? I have some free time and I always enjoyed playing before new expansions.
Mangle, Rake, Shred, Rip, Ferocious Bite, Savage Roar, Ravage (after a feral charge proc)? How has that been reduced to two buttons?
Maybe he has massive macros?
I was just restating complaints I heard, maybe I should have made that clearer. My druid is basically shelved, I only tank holiday events and stuff.
Shifting out doesn't even require a GCD, so I fail to see the problem.
Balance and Resto turn intellect into agility when in cat. Stam for bear.
Guardian turns stam into intellect or agility.
And so forth. There's also a talent at 90 that can give you even further boosts to secondary forms for a period.
First, the skills that change Int into Agil and Agil into Int are Killer Instinct and Nuturing Instinct respectively. Heart of the Wild is the talent at 90 that gives you a boost to alternate forms but not anywhere close enough for it to matter: they ignore tanks needing to be uncrittable (something I assume only Guardian spec will be innately but if it's part of bear form that'd explain it), damage spells costing no mana as resto doesn't mean shit when you're shooting at a third power compared to Moonkin, a caster spec trying to DPS as cat would be hilarious with only Claw, Rake, and Ferocious Bite to use, a feral trying to heal when they only get back 2% mana every 5 seconds is laughable since they'll have to spam cast to get anywhere close to healing as well as a resto with only Healing Touch and Rejuv to use (right now HT uses 5.5k mana and that'll only increase in MoP. That means for 2% mana regen per 5 seconds--using today's number--to keep them from going OoM their mana pool will need to be 459k and even halving that to 229.5k is still a ridiculous amount of mana).
My point from earlier was that with what they've presented so far, if you're in the middle of tanking and want to shift out to cast Rebirth or Innervate you'll still get smeared. If you're a cat and shift out to help heal then your raid is either fucked by then since if you're dps stopping doing dps to heal people are dying which means it's probably a wipe or it means that offspec healing for Druids is overpowered to the point that the lost DPS is made up with insane healing. If you're a tree or a boomy and shifting to cat to try to DPS for whatever reason then you're dumb because not only will Claw and Rake be nowhere as powerful as Wrath and Moonfire even with the Int to Agil buff, you'd have to move into melee range to do it. The insentives they're presenting as reasons to shift are laughable at best, especially on a 6 minute cooldown with the expectation of staying in a different form for 45 seconds. No one will want to change roles midfight for 45 seconds, maybe 10-15 seconds in case of an emergency but a full 45 is silly. Also Master Shapeshifter is really dumb since having a pure dps talent like that means it's a cookie cutter decision when someone's trying to max out dps (currently the answer is very obviously no).
Yeah, if it's beta and it's still like this, then obvious there's a problem. But the preview is supposed to show intent, and yes that IS their intent.
I don't think we can tell very much about their intent (to the extent that they even know themselves, in pre-alpha) from the talent calculator. Those talent trees need to have something useful for every spec in every application; it seems very likely that a lot of them would wind up being "pvp talents," the same way lots of talents are thought of that way now.
ed: note also that heart of the wild lasts 45s per six minutes in the current talent calculator. That makes it seem like a panic button more than anything else.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
And there are several situations in raids where a healer has died, and you need someone in a pinch. The loss of dps is easily made up by the group's dpsing for much longer on account of not being dead.
That's just healing. If you're feral, how many bosses have melee unfriendly phases? You could pop Heart and do some ranged DPS. Maybe a tank goes down or fucked up positioning. You can hold the fort while the tank gets rezzed and healed/buffed back up. Shit, just being able to pop heart, go to bear and taunt off the current tank could be considered a pseudo tanking cooldown.
While the situations are niche, there are a lot of them. It gives HotW a lot of versatility. Your alternatives are a dps compensation for whenever you have to cast spells (decent but not mindblowing), and the ability to remove roots and heal a generous chunk of HP (definitely a relief to healers, especially as tank with smart macros). All competitive skills, for the most part. It really depends on the context of the fight.
Is there a way that I just don't know about to increase the speed at which energy regens?
Because holy shit I spend an inordinate amount of time on long fights just staring at my screen waiting for enough energy to do anything when berzerk and that uh...one that gives me rage on a 25s cd are on cooldown. EDIT: I'm partially confused too because when I do swipe on AoE packs, even when I pop that rage thing I will just go out of energy after about 5-6 swipes and then I'm stuck staring at the screen again. What I'm confused about is that I see other druids when I'm on other characters seem to not have this issue.
Maybe I'm just too used to rogue energy management, but kitty just feels like a lot of waiting for energy which isn't enjoyable at all. I'm considering either just dropping kitty entirely and going bear and seeing how I like that or finishing up my resto set and making it dual purpose (it's just dungeons) for resto and moonkin.
Other than your finishers, pretty much everything you're doing takes 35-40 energy. You regen about 11-12 energy per second depending on your haste. Put those two things together with the 1 second GCD and yes, you'll have bits of downtime throughout a fight. Other than the cooldowns it's just OoC procs which are of course random as all get-out. Sometimes you'll get a few close together, and between that and Tiger's Fury you'll have like 15 seconds of nonstop abilities, and other times you'll have dry spells and end up waiting a couple seconds between presses.
I'm kind of curious how you can tell this or what makes you suspect it. Are you just watching everything the other cats do the whole time?
I'm not just trying to be a smart ass here; I can't think of anything but Magmaw in this expansion that's had a relatively safe DPS burn phase (less so in heroic, but I think the other healers could probably handle it).
Edit:
Can't think of anything else in T11.
T12, not really. There are periods of theoretically low healing requirements on Alysrazor, but those don't correspond with the burn phase. Maybe the first Domo cat phase? Eh. Maybe a Rag transition phase? Of course if you really need the extra damage help from a resto druid going HotW on the first one, your raid isn't going to get the fight anyway.
T13, Hagara has a burn phase, but it's short and 2/3 of your HotW would go to waste. Maybe during the first minute of Ultraxion since the raid damage is pretty low yet? I'm not sure about the tendon burns on Spine. Depending on what's still up I think there could still be a lot of healing needed.
Waiting is part of the deal, yes. But you may not be playing quite right, since even after the rotation was simplified, there are still a lot of little things to watch out for.
First, make sure you are never, ever using TF when you have more than 35 energy. Second, use your OOC procs on expensive shit like shred, not to refresh rip. Even if Rip is falling off. Third, refresh SR whenever you feel like it, which will almost never be at 5 points. If you have 4 CP, do not go for 5 to refresh SR because you may be wasting a double combo point proc, which is just so useless on SR. Fourth, on shitty target switching fights like Domo, just autoattack that stupid cat. Save your points for when you can go back to your main target. If you are watching your timers carefully and doing all of the above, the regen times you go through should be shorter and more spread out.
Swipe is expensive, yes, and you aren't supposed to be able to spam it. What you can do is intentionally pool your energy for when you know an AOE fest is about to happen (like on Rag) and save TF for when it comes. Alternately, on a fight like H Anub, you keep up what you are doing on the boss and only swipe on OOC procs. With the first method, make certain you are actually autoattacking.
Edit:
Damn, the feral T13 set bonus that makes Blood in the Water work at 60% is nice.
I don't know what I could be missing, that's why I was asking. I'm just cycling through my alts capping my VP and I just happen to have not played my alliance characters in ages so I'm really out of the loop; plus I had only played my druid up to 85 last year and then pretty much shelved him so while I thought I was playing right, I just wanted to be sure.
Plus I was comparing it to rogue combat where via various means it's pretty rare that I'm at a lack of energy to do something. Of course there's some waiting it just seemed like substantially more on my druid.
And yeah, I usually do pay attention to other classes I don't know very well when I know I'll be playing them soon. It just seemed like a lot of druids in the dungeons I've ran have been able to maintain their high swipe dps for the duration of trash fights and multi-target bosses like Mannaroth or Ashzara. At least their dps logs indicate a high % of their damage coming from swipe. I'm not really lacking in dps honestly. For my gear I'm doing perfectly fine so I'm not concerned about that. I was just curious about the energy regen situation. Like I said, I don't know the class very well at all so I figured it was entirely possible that I was missing out on an ability entirely or something.
I just won't worry about it then I suppose. If it keeps bugging me I'll try out bear and/or moonkin. Though once i get the gear for it I'll probably be straight resto since that's what I really enjoyed while leveling.
Speaking of Heart, its cooldown and duration are both too long which is one of the reasons I'm untrustworthy of Blizzard when it comes to "making druids shift more". 45 seconds of doing a different role is worthless, it'll always be capped off in some way. Burn phases generally don't last that long so you'll have to go back to tanking or healing sooner than later. If you're scrambling to make up for a tank or healer dying while they get battle rezzed then as soon as they're up and stable your job goes back to dps. And in all cases if you're relying on the cooldown for a crucial part of the fight then you've either got too many druids in your raid or you've lost before you've begun. If the duration and cooldown were both halved then it'd be way more useful.
Disentanglement will probably get some kind of nerf. It's very a obvious choice for tanks and good enough for anyone else.
Heart of the Wild just needs tweaking, and you can only get that from actual testing. The cooldown needs to come down, and the stat boosts might not be sufficient. It also needs to do a threat dump once it wears off, or else your dps is going to be in a weird spot once it wears off. The only exception being Guardian, which is easy to enough to do.
In PvP, Disentanglement seems obvious, but Heart of the Wild can be a very potent button for Feral and Balance. If your healer is shut down, then you can step in for what is a VERY long time in PvP.