As with every Cataclysm Beta Build, I will have a writeup on the changes Druids can expect and any/all Feral PvP ramifications soon.

* Lacerate now stacks 3 times (previously 5 times)
* Mangle (Bear) no longer has a cooldown
* Improved Feral Charge renamed to Stampede
* Heart of the Wild moved to Tier-1 Restoration
* Furor moved to Tier-1 Feral
* Nature's Cure (Tier 5 Restoration) Empowers your Remove Corruption spell to also remove a magic effect from a friendly target
* Natural Shapeshifter is now a 2-rank talent (down from 3)
* Other non-Feral changes as well!

The Lacerate change just makes no sense to me... that is going to make Pulverize-spamming in PvE as a tank so required that I cannot see rotations being anything more than a frenzied button-mashing that will end in carpal tunnel syndrome. However, this does lend itself some credence to the theory that Lacerate is going to be changed to the ability which reduces Armor (instead of FFF)... but then against probably not because Pulverize would just knock it off for 3 GCDs minimum. Lacerate is an ability in search of an implementation that makes sense in tanking.

The swapping positions of HotW and Furor is largely a useless one... except that it makes me hate HotW less. Remember how I always complained about HotW being a terrible mandatory talent? Now it is almost entirely optional, and the BEST option. It has tricked me into not hating it again. Furor is still mandatory, but SOOOOO good that you almost don't mind the fact that you cannot live without it.

Why did they remove the cooldown from Mangle(Bear)? It simply makes no sense... it is still the best Threat-producing ability we have (even better than Pulverize), so you just spam it... right? I have no idea what the idea behind this is... but it ends up being a slight PvP buff, since you can just spam your damage-dealing ability that happens to put up your snare while you turtle in Bear Form.

They finally removed the dispel magic mechanic from Remove Corruption. So, only Resto Druids will be able to remove Magical effects from a friendly, but we all expected that to be the case anyway. The nice thing is that Hex is still going to be a Curse and we can still remove it (and a Poison effect as well) with 1 cast, and while the cost of this spell is rather high for Ferals, the shapeshifting costs have been reduced enough that we should still be able to get back into Cat Form and regenerate that Mana with a single critical strike and Leader of the Pack.

Natural Shapeshifter is STILL in the game... I have no idea why. The mana cost of shapeshifting for Ferals is STILL dirt-cheap and we sort of expect it to stay that way. I cannot understand why Heart of the Wild is not the prerequisite for Master Shapeshifter. More to the point, however, is why MSS is still in the game. It is a 1-pt talent that increases critical strike chance in Cat form by 4%. The devs have said they do not like these talents, and yet they continue to exist for Ferals. BAH.

The big-ticket item is that ALL castable CCs are being changed from 1.5second casts to 2.0second casts, and many of them are having their range increased to 30 yards (except for Poly, which is still 35y by default)... except Cyclone which is being left at 20yards untalented and Entangling Roots which is being made into 35yards. The REALLY interesting thing here, which no one has really picked up on, is that this is a relatively strong Feral buff.

Since Ferals are always going to run with Predatory Strikes in PvP, we will always have instant-cast Cyclones/Roots every time we use a 5-pt finishing move. In a great number of ways, this makes us one of the most dominant CC classes to bring to the arena. I am a little bit worried that PS will get removed or changed so that Cyclone will have a cooldown before Cataclysm goes live, but if not Ferals will be a real contender in the arena because of the instant-cast Cyclones and the mana increase of Dispels in general, so spamming dispel on a Feral to knock off PS should be less of a concern.

Still waiting on Feral scaling to be properly implemented so I can pull more than 2k dps on the target dummy!



I got some video footage (and if you keep up with the comments, we played against Zooze again) of our 2v2 escapades and pushed up to 2260ish this last week. I was thinking of taking the Zooze video (Warrior+Druid this time) and showing why our strategy against this comp is better than "train the warrior." I will probably have this updated later this week! I need to make a YouTube account or something so I can put these videos up, which means I need to read up on the video size and all that. For some reason, the in-game capture I use (which is amazing after the graphics update and switch to GLL, btw... I'm getting like 60fps while recording, even in Dalaran where the waterfall used to freeze my computer if recording was turned on) makes the videos into GIGANTIC files. For instance, we had a 6 minute match against Zooze (I think it was 6m... hard to remember off hand... wasn't more than 10m for sure) and it is something like 1GB large... woof.



EDIT1: I am also going to look into a different means for grabbing and displaying my Armory feed... I find this Google "out of the box" option to fail more times than not, and I have no idea why. JQuery will likely resolve this issue quickly and nicely. Look for that sometime after this post gets updated.