Cata questionsFollow

So I won that little contest thingy, and transferred over my druid. I figure rather then doing a general question thread I'll focus on more class specific questions, so please let me know if you have any requests that I try something out, or do a specific thing, I'll try to respond with any details I can get.

My plan is to level my druid asap in the new areas, try out some of the new feral stuff like pulverize, and run some dungeons as feral and resto.

Ooo a couple of questions pop into my mind.

1) How bad are the mana-limitations in resto?

2) How does tank healing feel with the new LB+Nourish mechanic?

3) How many HP do you have in bear form?

I'm sure I'll think up more, thanks for making this thread btw.

Apparently so. Nourish refreshes the duration on Lifebloom, so you don't have to worry about the mana costs from rolling 3 stacks. I thought I also remember reading you can only have 1 LB up as well; so they were apparently aiming to make it a tank-healy tool. Was just kinda curious to know how it worked.

Thanks a lot for those replies, Weecher.

This... I don't know what to make of this, to be honest. My OSHI- sensor is picking up all kinds of bad vibes. Vengeance being a buff that supposedly increased DPS and thus TPS output of tanks the harder they get hit... Is it per hit or does it scale off of damage taken per second or so? How long does Vengeance last? What if the Druid dodges a dozen blows in a row (humor me)?

Wasn't fond of Pulverize to begin with. The thought of having to reapply Lacerate constantly isn't what strikes me as an improvement. Yes, I get to hit one more button every 20 seconds or so, but how about something cool instead of a stack purge with apparently a mediocre threat output?

Anyway, hope you guys change my mind, or this Fluffybear might just go Kittyrawr come Cataclysm.

Wait, Maul is turned into an instant cast on cooldown? But... why? What are they doing to my Bear?!

If I have to juggle Mangle and Maul along with Swipe, Lacerate and Faerie Fire, I'm going to kill someone. Hitting the same five abilities more times is not the same as improving the Druid tanking experience, Blizzard! Less hitting multiple crappy things and more new and fancy things that put us up there with the other classes in terms of fun.

Like putting Feral Faerie Fire on a 10-second cooldown and having it silence stuff for three seconds, for instance.

Edited, Aug 4th 2010 2:24am by Mazra

So instead of:

#showtooltip
/cast Mangle - Bear
/cast !Maul

It's just:

#showtooltip
/cast Mangle - Bear
/cast Maul

?

I mean, three seconds is nothing. I'm not going to hit Maul every three seconds as a rage dump. Assuming they're not changing rage gains dramatically (which I hope not, because rage starvation is a big enough problem as it is), we'd be overflowing with rage anyway. What they did was cripple the scaling something fierce. No longer scales with haste, which means lower TPS again.

Sigh, I'm keeping my hopes down to avoid being disappointed here, but it's really starting to look grim.

So no more armor and resistance from MotW?

Edit: I should click links before replying. The tooltip says +1 magic resistance, but I'm guessing that's a glitch or something. No more armor from it, though, but I'll manage.

Does make me happy that I can get both "Kings" and Might if I'm grouping with a Paladin, though. Now, if there's a Warrior in the group as well, he'd have to do Commanding Shout since Battle Shout would cancel Might. Good luck getting a DPS Warrior to use Commanding Shout. I haven't been able to yet.

And-- wait a minute... Astarin? Where did you come from?

Edited, Aug 4th 2010 2:50am by Mazra

I guess to be on topic I should add a question about Cata.

I've seen the videos of the Worgen starting area, and heard some basic explanation of how the NE helped the people of Gilneas. But given the way the Worgen area starts out, what's the lore behind Worgen dr00ds?

So we've got all three or four sides of the class covered by now. That's good. That's excellent.

Not only do we have a lot of drunken posters, but we also have more beta testers than any of the other forums.

I'll drink to that.

It's way too early here...

Everything I've read about feral seems to indicate that for bears you want to hit Maul when ever you can as it is your strongest attack and Swipe is now a joke. Pulverize isn't worth the threat loss of stacks and Thrash isn't available yet.

The build current build as far as I know still pushes you towards making a lol-feral build. Which is really lame.

Excuses...

You get new trees.

Most druid abilities have lower costs but the uber lol-feral build is still there. Staring at us and pushing feral back into the uber-OT spec from he11 we used in BC. Where spec for dps and tank was the same, heck back then gear as well which if they keep the spec as it is now we best be able to gem both 'specs' the same.

edit: Was looking at warrior trees when I linked, warrior looks sexier as Cata moves on. I wanted one for Wrath but stopped when I realized I wanted my warrior to be Worgen. Priest and rogue, the other 2 classes I play now, also look pretty sweet. Heck, the DK I rarely use now seems to be cooler come Cata than feral. I refuse to tree heal as I have a priest for healing. So I may, if things remain the same either go Boomkin or level someone else first in Cata. More likely the later option as Boom still seems to have issues as well with DoTs and Eclipse. Really hoping druids get a revamp in the next 2-3 Beta patches.

Edited, Aug 5th 2010 12:31am by Horsemouth

I'm quietly hoping they keep the feral tree like it is. I like being able to tank, dps, or heal interchangeably as needed, it makes filling groups that much faster. Granted that isn't really a problem with 5man anymore but being able to fill any hole in a raid will be excellent. Some people might say "that's what alts are for, duh" but I can't get tanking bracers for my bear if I switch to a priest now can I? :P

I don't think we'll be left as the perma-OT-bitch, the only reason that was the case in BC is because we could still be crushed. The high health and armor was supposed to compensate for that but it really didn't, so the shield tanks were still the preferred choices for anything boss level. That doesn't happen anymore so it should be pretty interchangeable.

I'll have to try an instance and just spam regrowth on the tank. I assume it works with the glyph, as it says amount healed.

I imagine they'll stop it stacking, although that might be a little complex due to it being on the ground. Otherwise druids will all just spam the tanks with regrowth and no one will ever need to heal the melee. I'm not sure how to change it though. Making it a target buff doesn't work either, because you can just rotate through the melee then. I think it's a cool mechanic, so I hope they figure it out.

Edited, Aug 5th 2010 1:18pm by Xsarus

So after reaching level 83 I thought I would post a few things:
1. Mark is now just like blessing of kings so when I refer to unbuff I mean with mark. Tank hp is 71k with only 4-5 upgrades mostly being accesories. Moonkin stats are 48k health and about 45k mana.

2. Items are being replaced pretty quickly upon entering deepholme, I'm mostly 264-277 epics. My weapon just got replaced on the very last quest of deepholme, say goodbye to heroic bloodfall.Most items would be replaced if I took the time to enchant most of the quest items-too lazy.

3. Questing is amazingly fun in cata, Hyjal and deepholme had very fun quests. Deepholme is massive and there were a lot of boss style fights - like one required you to jump from floating rock after another while killing this dragon.Group quests a non-existent even though some of the bosses I wiped on due to them actually being hard.

4. Vengeance Asnwers- Vengeance gets larger and larger depending on how hard you are getting hit. After roughly 30 secs the debuff goes away leaving you back at nothing. Hitting a string of dodges will not increase vengeance and if you avoid enough it could potentially were off. Easiest way I found to have vengeance up was to always chain pull :)

5 Having the new build put a 6 second cooldown on swipe, and I know have trash in my arsenal. So far threat is still wonky and not having good aoe really puts pressure on tank threat. Though they did reduce the rage cost of most of the moves. Pulverize is still worthless to a point, it's not bad on single target fights where you know you can keep aggro. It's also nice to use at the end of a trash pack so you will have hte buff for the next pack.

6. Boomkin is still broken as far as eclispe. Wrath hits like a wet noodle, while starfire hits alot harder than wrath- still best dps. Starsurge hits the hardest and the knockdown is sexy. Also the solar bream move is just amazing - nothing like rooting a caster under it haha. Starfall doesn't hit as a hard either it took a big nerf. Also found it very dangerous to use while questing pulled way too many adds. Another funny part is the amount of mana regen boomkins will see. I have 2100 mana regen in combat lol.

7. Starting area of hyjal mobs tend to have about 33k health while in deepholme they range from 55-70k depending on the mob. Most bosses will have 200k life and usually have some type of assistance to take them down. As far as levleing the first two levels go by super fast I don't remember how much exp it took. 82-83 reuired 6.5 million experience resulting in a good 7-8 hours to level.
I also started a Worgen and almost finished the goblin starting zone. Both zones are amazing and fun, goblins literally blow everything up.

So those are some cools highlights i'll update more later. Any other questions even if it is for other classes pre-mades are amazing ;p.

yeah mana regen is insane at least for moonkin, the whole 2100 in combat is pretty rediculous.

Seems like mana regen was set back to normal values. Moonkin at lvl 83 is now showing about a 750/550 mana regen ratio for OOC/IC . With a few of the changes last patch made to bear Cooldowns and bear moves I'm actually starting to like the new tanking system.

Haha Maz I was waiting for a post from you!

Okay I'll start with our Cooldowns if you haven't been looking at patch notes.

Barskin - It is still the same 20% reduction on 1 min CD.

Frenzied Regeneration - now Increases maximum health by 30%, increases health to 30% (if below that value), and converts up to 10 rage per second into health for 20 sec. Each point of rage is converted into 3% of max health. Stole this from the website, so basically they baked SI and FR into one cooldown it's pretty sick. Not sure if your like me I found myself using the two together alot. And yes the glyph of FR is still ingame. Also the 3% max health is suppose to be 0.3% I tested it on beta. it also has a 3 min cooldown.

Survival instincts - This move is now our shield wall *rejoice, basically 60% damage reduction for 12 seconds on a 5 minute cooldown.

I'm finding it very hard to replace my 4 pc t10 I <3 enrage so much with it.

Overall on moves they are mostly all the same. Most of the rage cost of each move went down by about 5 rage. This make's it a bit easier to have maul's and mangle ready for snap threat.

Swipe did get a nerf or buff however you like to call it, it is now on a 6 second CD. I did some testing and it hits normally for 6 times that of swipe without the CD. Overall I like the feel it makes AoE tanking fun and you have to plan when to use swipe now. Along with thrash tanking is actually fun and doesn't feel too clunky. They also took away the spell interrupt on bash but we have skull bash so no problems there.

The moves seem to flow together well a lot more fun than on live. Also I'm starting to learn how to weave pulverize into a decent trash rotation and use it on bosses here and there.

The one big thing I will say is that savage defense is going to be broken in the future especially in raids. Right now it procs 50% chance off a crit and makes a shield for 75% current attack power. What is going to break this move is the fact that we have vengeance. On beta I have around 4.3k attack power without vengeance. So the shield normally absorbs 3kish, in my last dugeon run I got a vengeance to get me upwards of 10k attack power. Now imagine that is a 8k absorb it is pretty sexy. I can definitely see this getting very large against raid bosses since the more damage we take the higher our AP will be thus getting nice fatty absorbs.

BEARS FINALLY HAVE A BLOCK MECHANIC

The latest talent build has left me debating whether +4% healing from MS is really worth 4 talent points, or if I'd rather have 6% intellect with an extra point to put somewhere.

This has made me a happy tree, er humanoid...

I don't mind the choices so much, a couple of hard choices could make it interesting.

The thing I'm pondering most at the moment is how much of it is going to be based on your guild. For example lets say your guild is pretty good at not standing in stuff, and you don't have dire mana problems. Perhaps you end up with something like this, skipping mana talents with points to spare. Now lets say they like green goo, red fire, and can't dodge a bouncing slime ball. Then you end up going something like this to avoid the dreaded OOM.

My guess is someone will do math at some point once everything is finalized and they'll be a priority of dropping/adding mana and spellpower talents depending on your needs, and what role we're "best" suited for in the new expansion. Though I fully expect people to be called "bad" if they have to take too much regen stuff.

Huge change to Thorns--it is now a 20 sec duration with 45 sec CD and does 1400% more damage than before.

Well, it was never reflective damage, per say, but yes.

I suppose. It will also probably be good to cast on a tank just as he pulls, too. But its mana cost is pretty high, so you definitely won't be hitting it on CD.

Super strong against Rogues though.

I'm about to go on a test run. I'll try casting thorns in bear form, see if you still shift out.
If you don't, thorns is the equivalent of Holy Shield now, reactive damage from the mob hitting you.