WOTLK Feral Druid Guide

[Darksend]

general statement: There is a bug, still not fixed even with 5 minute FF on PTR, that has been around since LK beta where if misery is on the target FF cannot be refreshed except by someone with imp FF unless the debuff completely falls off.

now to specificaly answer your question:

where are you getting 3% crit from? that 3% crit is only for the moonkin himself and it applies as long as ANY FF is on the target from any source.

as for the 3% hit, if you do not with a shadow priest then the bear should never FF


either way as i said in the patch FF becomes 5 minutes and needs to be applied tops twice a fight (although i need to test how much threat it does now that they trippled the ap coeffient)

[DaBear]

I read all of this and it's a lot of good information.
I been a Bear, since I started my Druid. And Honestly have not done much reading on changes since WotLK came out.
I got to 80 been running Heroics and MT and OT 10man Naxx. With few problems...
The one thing I want to do is increase my TPS, I have had a Lok' or Mage occasionally pass me up, and I want to beat our Pally Tank out. lol He has been 80 a lot longer and has better gear.
I see in all the Builds 5/5 of Render and Tear, which seems to be a waste to me. Unless i'm just totaly off.
Here's my current build which I will be redoing after reading here, to get Master Shape Shifter. WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Druid -> Talent Calculator

I know things will be changing again once we get the new patch, yet again. And as usually the only Druid in Heroics and Naxx I always kept IMOTW.

For AOE Tanking, my norm rotation is pretty much, SS bear, enrage, charge in, /swipe, demo roar, /swipe till all dead, with hitting Mangle when up inbetween all the swipes.

For Bosses, Charge, Mangle, FF, DemoRoar, swipe (for Snap&Snarl effect), lacerate to 5 with Mangle while it's up, then normally either swipe or lacerate. As I can't really see much of a TPS difference between them. with hitting Barkskin when it's up.
I rarely hit Maul as it was always a rage hog and slow. Though now it seems I will have to grab the Glyph and throw it in the aoe rotation.

Oh and one Trinket that was left off the list till you get the Armor ones is the one off the 2nd Boss in AG that gives you +111 Stam and a shield, Gibbons something. can't remember.

I still carry Bear and Cat Gear, as when I do go Cat, I go with whatever will give me the Max AP and Crit. Since I shouldn't be getting hit. Do many of you? I keep hearing that Blizz wants us down to one set for both, but, I don't see it for certain pieces yet.
Worth Respecing now? or wait till the patch?

[nefaisrien]

I've been doing quite a bit more tanking since my initial post and have gleaned some bits of knowledge.

First of all, maul is your friend, but it is a rage hog. For a while, I tried macroing it with swipe, mangle, and lacerate, but I found myself rage starved. I decided to downgrade it to just mangle. I am still using the BC badge idol for tanking. It procs a lot, and a bit of extra agility added to my next maul is nice for a bit more crit and maybe more rage for the next maul. Also, because I have the glyph, it's really good at getting a bit of lateral threat when tanking trash groups. As for trash, at the moment, I mostly swipe spam, toss in a mangle for the trinket proc, and keep an eye out for the mob with the lowest health, as that's probably the one that the pesky aggro whoring dpser has been focusing on and it might try to eat them.

For a while, I was playing with the idea of not getting 5/5 in rend and tear, but it's invaluable on bosses when you're spamming lacerate between mangle CDs. As for FFF, it appears at the moment to do about 1.5k or so threat, so I try to throw it into my rotation every time I need to refresh my roar. I have also been playing with combining enrage with barkskin to compensate for the increased susceptibility to damage as I am currently spec'd into 3/3 king of the jungle (one of the few points I allow myself for cat). A nice bit of extra damage, and as long as the burst damage from the boss/trash isn't too bad, barkskin should compensate.

Master shapeshifter, to me, seems like a waste of a feral druid's points. You get 30% mana reduction for shifting, and unless you're PvPing a lot, natural SS is basically useless. There are a few instance fights where I do power shift, but these are infrequent compared to the usefulness of other points. These 3 points and the 2 points for 4% extra damage or 4% extra crit could all be put into Naturalist for an extra 10% physical damage. I believe this is a much better build up to Omen of Clarity. By the way, if you want to reduce the cost of power shifting, you might be better off taking Primal Tenacity as it reduces the cost by ~17%/point, along with stunned damage and fear duration reduction as opposed to the 10%/point with Natural Shapeshifter.

Does anyone have a link to 3.1 talents other than MMO? I've never been able to get their site to load properly for the talent trees.

[Fujiiro]

The one thing I want to do is increase my TPS, I have had a Lok' or Mage occasionally pass me up, and I want to beat our Pally Tank out. lol He has been 80 a lot longer and has better gear.
I see in all the Builds 5/5 of Render and Tear, which seems to be a waste to me. Unless i'm just totaly off.

If you're having threat issues, then not having R&T is the reason. I was also initially not happy with this talent, but then I respeced for it, just to try it out, and my damage and threat went through the roof as a result. I would never tank without R&T again.

If you're not using Maul, that's also severely hurting your TPS. Maul does massive damage now, criting for upwards of 5k for me, which is a MASSIVE amount of threat.

If you're having threat issues on AoE trash pulls, there's not much you can do about it. The way swipe works just naturally makes it harder for bears to get and hold aggro on multiple targets than it is for paladins or DKs. If you run with a tankadin, let him tank the trash. If not, just make sure your DPS knows to give you a few extra seconds to build threat. (I love it when a mage drops Blizzard on me, while the mobs are still on their way, then complains that I can't hold aggro.) If your DPS are noobs, let them die till they figure it out.

My own build is based on the fact that I want the shapeshifting cost reduction of Primal Tenacity for soloing, and I threw one point in Infected Wounds to help out a mage in my guild who uses Torment the Weak. But I've noticed it often isn't even up on bosses, presumably because it's getting overwritten by something else.

I don't think anything in 3.1 changes much, other than Improved MotW being a must have talent. (I spec'd with it now, just to try out using a build with those points spent. After trying 3 points in Furor I've become a life-time fan of 5/5 Furor and I'll never go back to that BS of having to re-shift for a furor proc ever again.)

My current build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Also, here's a link to Wowhead's ptr druid talent tree: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

[WastedSpace]

Checking to see if I have Rend and Terror, but on bosses where I can keep rage I can avg 4.5k TPS generally with spikes in the 6k. The one Tankadin I ran with she is just a beast with avg 5-6k and spikes up to 8k.

But I did get pulled in a 25 naxx and gave the other two tanks a head start on the mobs just before Thaddius and Passed them both with aggro.


Maul is one of your key DPS now. Get the glyph and you can see crits over 7k over two targets, then if you crit with mangle at the same time that is 10k Damage real quick.

I can average 2k and if I time Berserk right should average 2.1-2.2k DPS on H CoS. I can also average over 2K DPS as OT in 10 or 25 OS till the last boss.

Only change I wish is that Growl would actually give the druid true aggro for 3-4 seconds. On Gluth I have issues when Growling getting aggro for 1 second then the other tank taking it right back.

[klinkin3]

I have a few macro's i like to add to your excellent post. First, i am all for doing things the lazy way, so here are a few tanking macros that work very well for me.

Single target threat macro=
/castrandom Maul, Mangle - Bear, Lacerate

Multi-mob threat macro=
/castrandom Maul, Swipe

Ok so why did i do castrandom?? All other macros i created did not use all the abilities consistently. The single target macro always que's maul if you have the rage (normally I do), It will apply mangle right away, and only refresh it when it is about to expire or has just droped, and will spam lacerate for all your other GCD's. I still manually FF and Demo roar as you never know if you will have a warrior and/or SP with you in raid.

The key with multi-mob tanking is positioning. I normally spend the first few seconds strafing 90-180 degrees either way getting all the mobs in a cone in front of me, while spamming this macro.

Mouseover growl macro=
#show Growl
/cast [target=mouseover, harm, nodead] [] Growl

This is very easy to use, you don't have to change targets, just have your mouse curser over the target you want to growl/taunt and hit the macro, done, thats it.

I did try a Cat macro but it fluxuates far to much for anyone macro to be effective.

[winnetou]

By the way, if you want to reduce the cost of power shifting, you might be better off taking Primal Tenacity as it reduces the cost by ~17%/point, along with stunned damage and fear duration reduction as opposed to the 10%/point with Natural Shapeshifter.

According to wowraid, build 9742 includes the following change:

• Primal Tenacity - Now only reduces damage taken while stunned in cat form, instead of any form.

[nefaisrien]

Source: klinkin3
Mouseover growl macro=
#show Growl
/cast [target=mouseover, harm, nodead] [] Growl

This is very easy to use, you don't have to change targets, just have your mouse curser over the target you want to growl/taunt and hit the macro, done, thats it.


There's a problem I see with using this macro. Unless your growl works better than mine, all it will do is make the mob look at you for a second, then it will go back to what it was doing before. If you don't actually hit it to generate more threat, all you've done is made yourself even on threat with whomever else is attacking it, but if they keep attacking it and you don't even do any white damage to it, the other person will have aggro on it as soon as your growl goes down. If you added a FFF to that (I have no clue how) to follow after the growl, this might be enough to actually make to mob come to you.

[Wingardium]

Just wanted to say, great article. And "dual" is with an 'a' when it's a spec feature and "duel" when you want to fight someone.

I really wouldn't have said anything, but this is stickied.

[Darksend]

on an average boss fight, maul can be anywhere from 60-75% of my total damage depending on crits, it is actually a pretty overpowered ability with RnT.

mouseover growl macro is something i use on both my warrior and druid, can't live without it, the trick however is to know on certain fights, such as sarth, to put the normal ability back on your bar. Anything with large hitboxes creates huge problems with this macro.

again, I am out of town until the 7th so i cannot properly answer this yet, but as i have said, I will be waiting until the patch actually goes live to update everything so there are no last minute changes after writing everything up

[nefaisrien]

Only change I wish is that Growl would actually give the druid true aggro for 3-4 seconds. On Gluth I have issues when Growling getting aggro for 1 second then the other tank taking it right back.

On 10 man, I try to save my mangle CD for right after my growl. Also, I have mangle macroed with maul, so I catch up in threat and get a boost right after. Works great. (On 25 man, I tank the adds. We have 2 feral druids in our tanking core. Each of us takes a grate and just hold them all and don't bother kiting them at all. I put on my best stam gear and with raid buffs I'm just shy of 50k.)

[WastedSpace]

Don't plan on doing that in 3.1. I may be over estimating, but I have a feeling the 33% armor reduction we will be seeing a decline in ablitiy to tank. I know in a patchwerk encounter I regularly see hits of 20k, and if my past experience before the armor increase I don't think we can take hatefuls anymore as I expect with less armor we will see fast hits of 20k - 30k and there isn't a healer out there who can cover that. Until the increase back to 66% I had to stack defense to survive heroics. Even with 38% dodge I was two shot sometimes by bosses with 36k HP. Put my defense gems back in and got it back to 450+ and tanked fine.

[klinkin3]

So i had to make adjustments to my macro's with 3.1, they should now read

Single target threat macro=
/castrandom Maul, [Form:1]Mangle (Bear)(), Lacerate
/cast Maul

Multi-mob threat macro=
/cast Maul, [form:1] Swipe(Bear)()
/cast Maul

As far as the changes for 3.1, i am fairly dissappointed. Healers say i take a little more damage than usual, and a bit more spiky. Our cat dps increased but that is irrelevant to our ability to tank.

[johnandre93]

How is druid tanking after 3.1.0?
I just tanked ramps on my 63 druid, and I felt I lost more hp, and I had less hp to lose.

I got 2k less armor at lvl 63, and 1.1k hp lost. (From 10k hp to 8.9k)

[Fujiiro]

How is druid tanking after 3.1.0?
I just tanked ramps on my 63 druid, and I felt I lost more hp, and I had less hp to lose.

I got 2k less armor at lvl 63, and 1.1k hp lost. (From 10k hp to 8.9k)

Over the weekend I tanked a successful full clear of 25-man Naxx.

On that run I was MT for all bosses except:

Patchwerk: after our OT got one-shotted (resulting in a wipe), I was switched to OT to absorb hatefuls, and we downed him on the second attempt without any deaths.

KT: After a failed attempt were I was MT, our OT had to leave, forcing us to promote a DK pug to MT, so I took over the OT duties of picking up adds. No problems there.
Also, we successfully completed the achievement Momma Said Knock You Out, again, with me as MT.

So I happy to report that the rumors of Druid tanks no longer being viable in raids are greatly exaggerated. [:]The World of Warcraft Armory link to my armory showing the dates of these recent achievements.

[Draks]

So i had to make adjustments to my macro's with 3.1, they should now read

Single target threat macro=
/castrandom Maul, [Form:1]Mangle (Bear)(), Lacerate
/cast Maul

Multi-mob threat macro=
/cast Maul, [form:1] Swipe(Bear)()
/cast Maul

I see the general idea behind these macros, but think that they could be cleaned up a bit to ensure they're doing exactly what you intended. First, the easy case - the multi-mob macro. I suggest the following:

/cast Swipe(Bear)()
/cast [nomod:shift] !Maul

The macro always casts bear swipe, and will toggle maul on (never off, that's what the '!' is for) unless the shift key is held down.

For the single target macro it's a bit more interesting. I'd prefer splitting it into two keys given the inadequacies of macros, but given what we've got to work with I think you'd be better off with:

/castsequence Swipe(Bear)(); Lacerate; Lacerate
/cast [nomod:shift] !Maul

You could even work in a reset=4 into that macro, but I've found that since that command operates off of the last button press it doesn't tend to work the way I'd like it to.

Hope those macro refinements help!

[klinkin3]

Thx Draks those did help clean it up, and appears to still work. I did however add Mangle in the single target as it is good threat and helps with bonus damage and threat. Looks like =

/castsequence Mangle (Bear)(), Lacerate, Swipe (Bear)()
/cast [nomod:shift] !Maul

Few changes was u need to put a space between *Mangle or Swipe* and the *(Bear)()*, also you need to use a comma(,) instead of a semicolon ( ; ) it just didn't work if i didn't use the comma's. For me anyways. Don't know if those were typos or not, but this was my end product.

[nefaisrien]

OMG, who loves our new swipe?! I certainly do. I'm not actually finding that I'm much squishier, but I've also respec'd to full survivability and regemmed for a bit more stam.

Seeing as people are talking about macros and such, I just use one, other than my OH SH*T one. [I don't know the exact syntax for the spell, I just shift-click it from my spell book]

#showtooltip
/cast Mangle(Bear)
/cast Maul

I simply use this macro for maul as well. If mangle is on CD, I get an error that says you can't do that yet, but who cares, it still winds up the maul. If it's not on CD, then I'm actually wanting to use mangle, so no problem. This macro also works if your in the GCD for a maul. It's nice and simple and gets the job done.

[Manßearpig]

I think its worth noting with the change to FF that you can opt out of the 3 points in imp mangle and put them elsewhere.

My rotation has changed to FF, Mangle, Swipe, Lacerate

[Draks]

Even with the change to FFF I think 3 points in imp mangle is a good investment. I would prioritize mangle over FFF to get the following rotation:

Mangle, FFF, x, Mangle, x, FFF, Mangle, x, x

(with x being either lacerate or swipe)