New Cataclysm Build (12759)
8:48 AM
Posted by Reygahnci on Monday, August 16, 2010
I am working on a post for this new build; there are LOTS of Druid changes to discuss! I will edit this post when it is done.
Here are the Druid changes in the latest build:
Balance
* Soothe Animal is now named Soothe - Soothes the target, dispelling all enrage effects.
Feral
* 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.
* Savage Roar now increases autoattack damage done by 50% instead of physical damage done by 30%.
* Bash no longer interrupts spellcasting for 3 sec.
* Enrage now increases physical damage taken by 10% instead of reducing base armor.
* Survival Instincts now Reduces all damage taken by 60% for 12 sec. Only useable while in Bear Form or Cat Form. Instant, 5 min cooldown
* Heart of the Wild now increases your maximum mana by 5/10/15% instead of increasing your Intellect by 2/4/6%.
Restoration
* Master Shapeshifter bonus increased from 2% to 4% for all forms.
* Furor now gives you a 33/66/100% (up from 20/40/60%) chance to gain 10 rage when you shapeshift into Bear form and you keep up to 33/66/100 (up from 20/40/60) of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form. Now increases your total Intellect by 2/4/6%. (Old - Only increased in Moonkin form)
* Naturalist is back as a Tier 2 Talent. Reduces the cast time of your Healing Touch and Nourish spells by 0.15/0.35/0.5 sec.
Okay... these all have pretty crazy ramifications as it pertains to Ferals; let's dive in!
Soothe is interesting if only for the following reason: Restos/Balance Druids can knock Savage Roar off of Ferals now. While this might seem huge, SR has been changed pretty severely, so we will reserve judgment for a bit.
Frenzied Regen is essentially its old self AND the old Survival Instincts lumped into the same ability. This is baller on the one hand because it means that Bear Form gets two medium survival cooldowns lumped into one huge survival cooldown, and I still think we will be going Bear Form more and more in Cataclysm for survivability, so this is baller.
Enrage now increases physical damage taken by 10% instead of decreasing armor horribly. This doesn't really matter as we never really use it in PvP. Bash no longer interrupts, well that makes sense because now we have Skull Bash. Heart of the Wild has had its Intellect scaling changed in favor of maximum mana scaling... I think this is to keep Boomers/Restos from getting HUGE Intellect instead of HUGE mana... having more mana is the intent of this talent, but Intellect gives crit as well as mana, so it's not really where the devs wanted it. This change won't really matter for Ferals, but whatever... we care about the AP, so we will still take it.
Survival Instincts is now the equivalent of Shield Wall... all Ferals will be taking this talent for PvP builds... period. This has been something I think Feral (PvP) has needed for a really long time - a defensive cooldown that matters. It would be amazing if this went live before 4.0, but it would make Feral a powerhouse in PvP and the OBVIOUSLY OP-est tank in PvE end-game.
Furor has been updated to do what we all expected it would: work as the Live's version at 5/5. This is awesome... nothing else to say.
Master Shapeshifter has had its effect doubled (4% crit in Cat Form now), but it still is a talent which reads: "Increases you critical strike chance in Cat Form by 0/0/0/4%." It is for this reason that I believe this talent (and hopefully NSS) will be completely removed before Cataclysm ships... no one will be taking this talent if they can avoid it.
Naturalist is back, but no longer mandatory for Ferals as it no longer increases physical damage done; beautiful!
Savage Roar
Savage Roar deserves a heading as it has gone through the biggest change we have seen yet. SR has gone from "increases all damage done by 30%" to "increases autoattack damage by 50%." The main thing to note here after much testing is the following:
using SR does not affect ANY Yellow damage at all. It makes your paperdoll damage go up, but it does NOT affect abilities which are supposedly based off of your paperdoll (Mangle/Shred/Ravage).
So what does this mean??? What direction is Blizzard taking SR!?
Well, it is going to be more like Slice and Dice for Rogues. Currently, you use SnD for added sustained damage, which is something one would keep up 100% in the PvE environment, but is only "nice to have up" in PvP. If you watch high-end Rogue PvP vids, they very rarely have SnD up in PvP except for scenarios where they are bursting hard with Bloodlust and going for a kill inside a stun (read: RLS, hRLS). Therefore, we can lightly assume that Blizzard wants a similar play-style for Ferals.
The implication here is that we are no longer going to be penalized for NOT having SR up before dealing damage, thus our ramp-up time has dropped SIGNIFICANTLY from Wrath->Cataclysm. Instead of playing the game as "Pounce, Mangle, SR, Rake, Shred" and keeping SR up 100%, we can play more along the lines of "Pounce, Mangle, Rake, Shred" and only use SR when we plan on doing extra sustained damage... say after we have ramped up entirely and have extra combo points to spare. Here is an example:
Pounce, Mangle, Rake, Shred, HOLY-CRAP-OUR-FIRST-FINISHER-IS-NOT-SR Rip/Maim
The first rotation allows us to get ALL our damage dealing out into play. Now, you can easily Shred again, and apply SR if you want some more sustained damage while you wait for energy to regenerate, OR if energy-regeneration is something that feels natural, maybe you continue your rotation and just keep Rip/Maim rolling and neglect SR entirely!!!
It is entirely too early to tell whether SR will still be mandatory for PvP-damage, particularly given that the focus in Cataclysm is going to shift FROM Burst TO Sustained. If that shift is minor, and we still need to deal burst damage more-so than sustained but no one will be getting killed in a blanket silence, then maybe we won't use SR in PvP except during kill-windows when we have ramped everything else up... say you applied Rip/Rake/Mangle and now you're pooling to 100 energy and 1cp, you use SR, then ShredShredShredTFShredFB for some really strong burst WHILE your DoTs are ticking and your white swings are doing way more damage. However, if sustained is KING in Cataclysm, then SR will most certainly be required, but not necessarily 100%. I could very easily see out-last being more important, so if you are playing Feral+Priest, you would do something more along the lines of your opener, get some mana burns out there, hit him with Maim, get some more mana burns out there, apply Rip, then as he gets out of LoS you apply Rip, then get a 1-2 point Savage Roar going for sustained damage while he heals up and you try to get your position back in line to land some more stuns for Mana Burns.
Another interesting aspect of this is that it makes Fury Swipes that much more appealing. If white damage is going to be such a large portion of our overall damage, then being able to swing again every 6 seconds would be pretty beneficial.
I'm super-swamped at work... but I'll try to get more updates in as I can!
August 17, 2010 at 12:57 AM
Hey Reyghanci, It's Zooze, I faced you in 2v2 yesterday. Do you remember? Our match was pretty long, I'm the Resto Druid, I was with Socronis, the warlock. You are like the only Feral Druid/Disc Priest team I've faced, and boy are you guys annoying with your stuns and mana burns. :P
It was such a long match.... lol
well c ya!
August 17, 2010 at 12:58 AM
Reygahnci*
August 17, 2010 at 8:03 AM
Yeah, I remember that match rather well... all 42 minutes of it!
Good match!
Guntir rather recently got his Purified Lunar Dust, so we were trying out a new strat against Warlock+Druid (train the Druid, CC the lock... mana burn till your fingers hurt). We only play ~10 matches a week now for points, but you'd be surprised: we went against 7 Lock+Druid teams last night (well... 8, but the last one was a destro+boomkin team, so we aren't gunna count that).
As a matter of curiosity, how did you find my blog?
Not trying to be a jerk, but I screenshot that scoreboard because it was one of the longer matches I've ever been privy to as Feral+Disc:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/97347/wow/Long2sMatch%28Feral%2BDisc%29.jpeg
August 17, 2010 at 10:19 AM
Also, I wanted to mention that your positioning in that match was AMAZING. You only had Relentless Shoulders iirc, but you must have been 2k+ as Lock+Druid in TBC... your positions for drinking and just regenning while making distance were simply beautiful.
Our skype conversation was essentially one of "okay, got a full Maim coming, call for it... SHIT, Bashed, full Cyclone, he's going to get away" and you'd end up in that little pillar-corner on the opposite side of the bridge on the chase; AMAZING!
Keep it up, you guys are a shoe-in for 2.2k and probably higher if you keep playing like that. It's funny, but we almost went to a draw with that match; if Guntir hadn't dispelled your Innervate (and really, this was the ONLY example of bad positioning you had the entire 42min match) it would have been a double-loss.
I really enjoyed the match, I hope you did, too, even though we won. I love long matches like that, it allows us to really get into the game and explore positioning, CC-chains, and defense. This is the reason I love 2v2s and hate that Blizz took out the titles.
I would have been fine with Blizz taking out the 277 weapons from 2s and leaving the titles because I can get the 277 weapon from 3s or 5s if I really put in the time (I have a full boomkin set... 5s as caster-cleave is ezmode 2.2k)... I just want my Duelist title back...
August 18, 2010 at 3:48 PM
I actually met you in a random battleground, you were a boomkin, and I whispered you and talked to you for a bit throughout the BG, and I told you I remember your name from reading the WoW forums, and you told me you got banned from the forums so you started a blog, and you sent me the link to your blog. I bookmarked it. Then I came across you in arena, and I'm like, "woah! it's Reygahnci!" lol. It always throws me off when I face people in arena I kind of know. It gets me kind of nervous Lol. Yea and I did enjoy that match we had. My warlock was complaining the whole time about not being able to get on anyone because you guys were both chasing me around, and I was trying to LOS the priest as best as I could. Lol and my lock would ask me like, is your innervate up? And I'm like "yeah", and he's like ok wait, wait, ok INNERVATE!!! and I'm like "hold on not yet, I gotta cyclone the druid before my innervate otherwise he can instant cyclone me." lol, it's hard to setup for an innervate, I had to cyclone you, and LOS the priest for the whole duration as best as I could. And I remember that moment when the priest dispelled my innervate like right when I put it on myself. That was a bad move on my part. Usually I can get away with it, but I think your priest was expecting it or already in the middle of spamming dispel on me. :(
But anyways I enjoyed the match even though it was frustrating, it's cool to see a skilled Feral. I was impressed.
August 18, 2010 at 4:00 PM
I appreciate the kind words Zooze.
I remember that AB, you were whispering me while I was at LM punting people off the side like a boss! LoL
Coordinating your Innervate is your job more than the Lock's. You need to be planning it more than him and say "I need a peel when you got it so I can Innervate." No one will know how much pressure you are under like you do... so let the Lock play his role as utility in that spot.
It was a really fun match... if we get you guys again, hopefully it doesn't go QUITE that long lawl.
August 20, 2010 at 4:20 PM
Reygahnci... my warrior thinks you are annoying.
August 20, 2010 at 4:21 PM
I am also quite annoyed by Stun > Mana Burns too.
August 21, 2010 at 1:40 AM
You should have stuck to lock+Druid; in all honesty, it's a better comp on the average. War+Druid tends to have trouble when going againt priest+dps when the dps can CC the warrior. War+Druid is a specialty of ours... Pretty much cc the warrior 100% and mana burn the Druid down, but since warriors are melees, they can't peel for you when we root him and start the mana burns with STUNS... Sorry, down at the beach house drinking typig on my iPhone >_<
August 26, 2010 at 11:40 PM
Ah, I never left the warlock. I regularly did 2's with both the warlock (my rl stepbrother) and the warrior (a rl friend). But now the warlock has decided to stop playing WoW. And me and the Warrior started playing a different game. WoW is getting kind of boring. And yes, Warrior + Druid has huge issues with cc'ing of the warrior.