Opinions on Feral Druids, for Cataclysm BG's (Rated and Normal)

[Ualaa]

This is what I have so far...



The team has stealth, which allows us to pick the battles we want to fight and avoid those we don't. Feral Instinct improves our Stealth, as does the racial Elusiveness. Our stealth is strong.

Combine this with Feral Charge (Kitty) and Ravage, and we have a very strong opener that should just about rape any target. With the charge, Ravage is energy free and the crit chance is increased by 50%, which should have us near 90% crit (x5). The non-crit (at 80th) is 850% damage plus 2516.

Bleeds (Rake/Rip) make up the lion's share of our damage (75%, at 80th). These dots are physical effects, so not subject to decursing. Our Mastery skill increases the effectiveness of bleeds by 3.1% per point. Mangle has been substantially buffed, and while not as strong as Shred, is not that far behind. A working and effective DPS rotation is fairly simple; not optimal like a single box druid, but quite powerful. Mangle > Rake > Mangle > Mangle > Rip, then repeat but Ferocious Bite instead of Rip (Ferocious Bite, refreshes the Rip duration on targets below 25% health).

Tiger's Fury, and trinkets gets us burst on demand.

The team has mobility. Cat Form is +30% movement. Travel Form is +40% movement. Shifting will break any root/snare effect. We can power shift, via /Cast !Cat Form, which won't take us out of Kitty but will count as a shift to remove any snare/root. Cat Form has the skill Dash, +70% movement for 15 seconds. Then we round-robin our Stampeding Roar, +40% movement for (6x5) 30 seconds. Aquatic Form (minor glyphed) is +100% swim speed. All shape shift forms render us immune to Polymorphs too. Flight Form is instant, and as a Night Elves we can Shadow Meld even in the middle of combat and then Flight Form away to fight another day.

Any finishing move has a 20% chance per combo point, to make our next Nature Spell of under 10 seconds cast time an instant cast. Ferals stack Agility, and to a lesser extent Stamina; in addition talents increase our crit chance by 9%. Even in sub iLV200, mostly fresh to 80th gear, a Kitty has approximately 40% crit; in PvP gear, even against a high resilience target crit chance is over 50%. Primal Fury gets us two combo points on a crit, our other moves give one combo point. Our rotation is four moves and then a finisher. Even with only 40% crit chance (60% chance to not crit), we have 0.60 x 0.60 x 0.60 x 0.60 = 12.96% chance of no crits, or 87.04% chance of at least one crit; but given four moves, this translates even more favorably: 4 CP's (12.96% chance) gets us an 80% chance of the proc (12.96 x 0.80 = 10.368%) and 5 CP's (87.04% chance) gets us a 100% chance of the proc (87.04 x 1.00 = 87.04%) for a total chance of 97.408% an instant cast Nature Spell.

Think Healing Touch x5, or instant Cyclone, or a battle rez (which glyphed is a 100% HP rez). Combined with instant cast Entangling Roots (glyphed), an instant Cyclone is very effective crowd control.

Hybrid mana pool sucks, but every melee crit replenishes 4% of our health and mana... so it can be very quickly recuperated. In addition, the team each has Innervate. I really like that everyone can heal and everyone can rez.

Fear is the bane of most boxing compositions. Any priest, warlock or warrior can send your team scattering in five different directions. Berserk is 15 seconds (20 glyphed) of Fear Immunity, plus it breaks fear effects. And our attacks cost only half as much rage, which means double damage (energy permitting) for the duration. Berserk (usable every 3 minutes) counts as the first fear, and the trinket will cancel the second fear; with diminishing returns, if they're still alive the last fear won't last more then a couple seconds and then we're immune.

Against melee we can use Thorns, which is a punishing damage shield. This is particularly nasty for fast attacking classes. Bear Form is another option, against melee and it drastically reduces physical damage taken. And add in Frenzied Regeneration. The other Bear Form trick is Feral Charge, for the Stun.

Both Cat/Bear have Survival Instincts, 50% damage reduction for 12 seconds. Barkskin reduces all damage by 20%, also for 12 seconds; the two effects stack. Nature's Grasp (usable in Feral Forms) lasts 45 seconds, on a 60 second cooldown; 3 charges each giving a 100% root chance.

Skull Bash is a spell interrupt the same as Kick. Two of my druids will spec into Brutal Impact, which reduces this to a 10 second cooldown. With five druids, a spell caster can be locked out of a schools for upwards of 30 seconds; longer, if more druids spec'd into Brutal Impact.

The Druids have slightly different primary specs. One has taken Feral Aggression and the Faerie Fire glyph, for a full three-stack Faerie Fire on a single application. Another has Infected Wounds for the 50% snare and 20% melee attack speed penalty, this Druid also has the Rake glyph, for PvE purposes. The third Druid has all the Bear related talents, and the Maul glyph which opens up PvE options. The remaining two Druids have Brutal Impact for the extended Pounce duration and reduced Skull Bash cooldown, plus have taken the Battle Rez glyph for 100% B.Rez's.

They all have Resto as an off-spec. This opens up a change of pace, option. And PvE with the same team.

Prime glyphs include: Berserk (+5 second duration), Mangle (+10% damage) and Rip (+15% damage).
Major glyphs are: Entangling Roots (insta-cast), Thorns (-20 seconds, cooldown) and the third varies for each Druid.
Minor glyphs are: Aquatic Form (+50% swim speed), Dash (20% cooldown reduction) and Rebirth (no reagent).

I'll have standard tricks, like:

 Druid A:
/Targetenemyplayer
/Cast Cyclone

Druid B:
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Cast Cyclone

Druid C:
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Cast Cyclone

Druid D
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Cast Cyclone

Druid E
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Targetenemyplayer
/Cast Cyclone

Each Druid will select a different target, within range.
To a maximum of five opposing players.  
It won't target pets/totems etc.

[Sbrowne55]

I paly ferals at first in low lvl bgs. I just found them too squishy without heals.I tried one resto and that was much better. After testing I went with 2 restos. Its really balanced this way, but you can't global anyone, and feral burst is really not good.

I would love you to try it out. I've got tons of macros made, and I'll def be stealing your cyclne macro. I had no idea you could stack target enemies in macros t work out that way. What I was doind was wait for predator swiftnes proc assist main and apply. It wasn't as good as yours that's for sure.

Are you going to pvp, if so, from my experience I left out all fb stuff, it just doesn't do enough dps I found and it was so situational I found.

I'd consider putting in more fb in my setup, but I need some sort of combo point display on my main from slaves.

If you want some macros, I,ve got plenty now.

[Shodokan]

Low level burst is not the same as high level burst... new abilities matter way too much for damage.

[Ualaa]

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by that?
Ferals (Cat's anyway) don't get new DPS moves, burst or otherwise.


5x Ravage, from stealth as an opener.
Virtually guaranteed to crit, for each druid.
That's the opening burst.

Beyond that, Tiger's Fury + Trinkets and Bersker are the burst tools.

In the current game, Bleeds are very strong DPS.
And everything I've seen/read of beta, they're strong at 85 too.

[Owltoid]

I think Sho was talking about Sbrowne's post, not referring to your level 80s, Ualaa.

[Ualaa]

Ahh, in that context.. the comment makes a lot more sense.

I don't see my 5x Ferals as being that good in arena.
But think/hope they'll be decent in battlegrounds.



Any suggestions for improvement.
Or reasons they won't work, ie., challenges they'll have to overcome...
Are very welcome.

[Ualaa]

Are you going to pvp, if so, from my experience I left out all fb stuff, it just doesn't do enough dps I found and it was so situational I found.

I'd consider putting in more fb in my setup, but I need some sort of combo point display on my main from slaves.

If you want some macros, I,ve got plenty now.

Yes, the primary focus will be battlegrounds, both rated (until max Conquest Points each week) and then non-rated.

Definitely interested in seeing what has been tried before.
What has worked, but also what has not worked and why it hasn't.



I honestly don't like Ferocious Bite that much.
But I've found Rip will randomly fail to apply on top of another Rip (even from the same Druid), with the message to the effect that it cannot overwrite the existing spell.
Ferocious Bite being a straight DD can always apply.

I'm making the assumption... 10x Rakes, 50x Mangles, and 5x Rips, the target will either be dead, or below 25% health at which point the FB will refresh the Rip. There's no guarantee of that.

If a 5CP Rip would always land on a target, without the occasional but consistent glitch, I'd probably omit FB entirely.



The Combo Points are hard to track.

I've basically just decided on a rotation of:
a) Four moves that give Combo Points; and then
b) A move that uses Combo Points.

And then trusting to luck.

Feral Cats have always had an abundance of Crit.
Most often, I'll get at least one crit out of the four moves (in a few hours of tweaking the DPS, the active toon always had at least one crit in four moves).
That's not a guarantee, but again it is quite likely at least most of the time.

The pacing is perfect for Rake uptime.
Unfortunately, Rip should really be allowed to tick a tad longer, before it is again applied.
Messing around for a bunch of hours, it seems the choice is:
a) Rake is perfect, Rip is never allowed to expire but is reapplied too early.
b) Rip is perfect, but the target does not have Rake on them at all times.

[shadewalker]

But I've found Rip will randomly fail to apply on top of another Rip (even from the same Druid), with the message to the effect that it cannot overwrite the existing spell.

This may happen if you used a trinket or some other ability to increase the damage of the first rip. The second rip would be less powerful (do less damage over time) and therefore fails to be applied. I had the same problem when using thorns, with a message something like "a more powerful spell is active"

[Ualaa]

That makes sense.

And my macro at the moment is something like this:

#show
/castsequence reset=target Mangle, Rake, Mangle, Mangle, Rip
/cast Tiger's Fury
/use 13
/use 14

Easy fix, thanks.

[Sbrowne55]

I learned to add TF in another macro, along with my rocket gloves/trink and any other good stuff

If you put it in your current macro you'll burn it at the start(has no global CD), and waste your 60 energy gain(2 mangles), and also it will fall by the time you reach rip in your macro which is your signature dps.

You want to apply TF before a rip, I usually mash my TF just before, if you apply it afterwards, it doesn't apply to your bleed.


And to Shookan, my druids are 80 now and almost all wrathful. Was just sharing when I changed from 5X feral. Perhaps a better write up would have done the trick lol. You're right about burst, but say compared to a shammy, or a mage, you don't compare well. Nothing dies unless you got rips pouring on them. or a ravage. and rip takes a while to reach in pvp. Which gives your target far to much time to escape.

And yes Ualaa, ravage X5 is a global kill, but if you don't have heals, you'll maybe in a 5v5 kill 2-3 people. I say you try it tho, perhaps it will work for you.

Also, beserk uses a large cooldown, and its also on a global cooldown, so it makes it hard to fire off while mashing a dps macro, you litterally have to stop everything mash mash mash and continue on with your dps macro. I find it kinda annoying lol. I seriously just use it as a second trinket for fears.

One thing I am bad at and want to improve is I never swap to bear form enough lol. You could probably global 1 target with ravage, and get anotehr down in cat form, then swap to bears. They heal alot with leader of the pack, and coupled with there cooldown abilties, you could tear down meele or casters without a healer easily.

And one last thing, you're going to hate mages ALOT lol.