Well i'm 64 now, and I must say that solo healing even as feral spec is pretty easy with decent quest blues in mana tombs. I don't have the oh-sh* buttons a resto spec would, but as long as I stay ahead of the healing game, noone dies. Druid healing is pretty damn fun.
Couple nuances I have so far (from what is otherwise an amazingly fun class to play):
1) DPSing (or leveling) as cat is boring. Manglemanglemanglemangle.
Mangle is good. Too good? All my other abilities that I used before it took a back seat. It's like shred, except for 40 energy, with no positional requirement. Claw is absolutely worthless now. The "increase bleed damage" effect is OK, but I really only see that helping in raids I guess. I really tried to level up on mobs putting all or some bleeds up, and keeping the mangle debuff on, you know, to get the full use out of that talent and its synergy.
The problem is, I get more dps just from mashing mangle than trying to take advantage of its synergy with increasing bleed damage. The other abilities that cause bleed aren't worth using, as I seem to get far more overall dps, and a faster kill time just by mashing mangle. My other abilities that cause bleed damages + the 30% bonus to bleeds aren't worth using over mangle spam, at least not when solo.
The end result? Single button mashing, which is boring and uninteresting.
Bear form is awesome. Primal Fury is a ridiculously good talent for tanking. Swiping 3 mobs and getting crits = gaining rage on a rage-using ability. Pretty nuts. I don't seem to have any problem holding agro with 3/3 feral instinct.
As far as feral/resto synergy goes, I really only have mixed feelings about a couple of things:
Naturalist:
I have many mixed feelings about this one. This talent seems to come in handy while im actually tossing out the semi-rare big heal when main-healing for an instance. It seems more like a PVE talent than anything.
It's great for more feral damage, but I never, ever use healing touch when I shift out to heal someone or myself. I stack up the more mana efficient hots and then go back to cat/bear. I may also throw up a regrowth, but never really a healing touch.
So essentially this is a PVE main-healer talent that's nearly useless to resto druid who wants to PVP as well, as these points are much better spent elsewhere. And while the feral damage bonus is awesome for feral druids, the resto spell it augments for feral druids is less than ideal.
I'm not saying healing touch is bad. I'm just saying that as feral, I use regrowth and other hots far more than HT. 3.5s is a long cast, and I do love the lower cast time. I could actually see this talent benefiting a balance/resto hybrid/mix more than a feral/resto.
If I were to make any changes, I'd give the +10% dmg bonus for feral druids on Nature's focus, as you often shift out to heal with things beating on you (and barkskin isn't always up), and put a spell damage bonus or other bonus to Naturalist, as resto tree doesn't really have any passive bonuses to balance other than the 30% regen talent.
The only other thing that I love and hate at the same time, is Omen of Clarity. It seems odd that for a talent that resides in resto, you have to melee to get it to proc. This talent is AWESOME for bears/cats (assuming it isn't dispelled), but tbh it never really procs while healing anything... which is odd, as it resides in the resto tree. I'm not sure if it's the talent tree placement that I don't like, or the fact that it never really gives me any bonus heals when I'm healing. In addition, it also doesn't proc off of balance spells. Just seems to me like this ability could be reworked a little bit.
8 comments:
Bear in mind that Mangle currently has a GCD of 1 second and is being adjusted to the proper 1.5 in 2.4.
Two Mangles every 3 seconds instead of three should make a bit of a difference.
Bear in mind. Nice. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.
But isn't that a bear-only change?
"Mangle (Bear) now properly triggers a 1.5 second global cooldown, increased from 1.0."
In addition, Mangle has a 6s cooldown in bear form anyways. I don't see that change either affecting bear-form tanking much, nor my argument about its use in cat form.
I only see the bonus bleed damage synergy when I use bear form to solo an elite or for bonus threat on the lacerate dot.
The bonus damage on mangle in cat is pretty much worthless for solo cat DPS. It only seems useful when grouped with other physical DPS so there is "some" group synergy outside of ilotp.
Yeah, that's kind of what I figured.
Then again, PVEing on a rogue bored me to tears as well, so it comes as no surprise to me that I'm not very entertained with kitty form so far.
Being able to stealth around with a rogue partner, however, is fantastic.
I too found feral to be ridiculously boring and repetitive to level with in outlands. At 63 or 64 I switched to a dreamstate+resto spec(31/0/21 plus a few) and leveled as balance and main healed instances all the way to 70. This seemed just as fast as feral and about 100x more fun. Maybe it was because I was coming from playing another caster though I'm really not sure.
Yeah I hear you. The only reason I'm really doing it is because I'm leveling with a rogue, and feral druid + rogue has pretty good synergy.
I am looking forward to speccing out of it soon, though.
Actually, the other effect of mangle "increases shred by 30%" can be particularly useful when you're not the primary focus target.
Also, if you do PvP as feral (lol), it's somewhat useful to try to get behind your target and hit shreds (42 energy talented) as long as the mangle debuff is up.
Rip is very powerful, if the target doesn't die too fast, which may not be too often while leveling. And lacerate is useful while tanking (also a bleed).
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