A lot has been said, but just to clear up any confusion:
- Shifting costs a significant amount of mana (% of base mana), but once you have some int gear it isn’t insurmountable
- You will either stat for feral (str/agi/stam) or for healing (+heal/int/spir/stam), in general your cat abilities won’t be great (although you could swap weapons, they are just weak stat sticks to ferals in vanilla)
- You can minimize the impact to the mana loss by speccing Omen of Clarity and natural shapeshifter
- You probably won’t spend much time in cat before you need to drop out and heal, if you are the main healer in a 5 man you would be adding more to the chaos of healing as a druid. They are great single target healers but are the weakest group healer
- Druids do regen mana after 5 seconds while in forms (shifting counts as spending mana, so it starts after you shift)
- I wouldn’t recommend trying this in a raiding environment
I don’t want to deter you, because it sounds like a fun playstyle - but I think it will put your group at unecessary risk for little gain. At least you could use the clearcast omen proc for a max rank regrowth on the tank when you shift out of your form. I’d recommend druid mana bar (to show your mana in forms).
Its possible to make this work with good macros, but if you mess up you only have a battle rez to bring back one person. I’d recommend trying this as an OT/DPS in dungeons before you try it as the main healer.
Find a guild that enjoys such madness as well and are willing to try new things!
Hope that helps. <3
Catweaving is definitely viable in 1.12. It may not make the best healer, but Druid doesn’t make the best healer. It won’t be topping (or even showing up on) the DPS meters, but a dedicated Kitty is no superstar on the meters (unless you try really, really hard). However, it does have all the tools to catweave, and is a pretty fun way to play.
It has:
- Gear designed for that purpose (plenty of hybrid leather gear available all the way up through AQ40). You can (and must) swap weapons between forms to enhance each playstyle. This costs you nothing but a macro.
- Kitty DPS is largely gear related (see above)
- Healing is mostly Healing Touch spam (of various ranks), so 21 points is all you really need in the Resto tree.
- You absolutely regen mana while in Kitty form.
- You won’t be powershifting Kitty, because your primary reason for shifting into kitty is to do something useful (DPS + Omen procs) while you regen mana. This is equivalent to Priest wanding, but a fair bit more dynamic and fun.
- Because you only need 21 points in Resto, you can do a 0/30/21 build or a 24+/x/21+ build. Both of these builds compliment catweaving. The feral hybrid gives you more kitty damage, increased stats (mana) and tankiness (can also offtank well with this spec). The Moonglow build gives more healing and shifting efficiency/ranged DPS/Improved thorns, etc.
Of course you also get the great utility just by being a druid. If you want to play druid and catweave in raids or dungeons its a great way to play. In fact its better than a pure Resto by many measures. You won’t be the best at anything, but no druid is (except tank in some situations). So yes, it’s viable if that’s what you want to do.
Can someone clarify why a couple people above mentioned Druids have “no rez”?
EDIT: Nevermind, it’s all coming back to me.
I still would have worded it differently…they have a 1x/30m Rez…since Rebirth is technically still a rez. And if you rez the shaman/priest/paladin…your group is still good to go.
You might be able to make this work?
I just did a theorycraft talent build and you’d probably want to go 14/19/18.
14 in Balance to get Natural Weapons, Natural Shapeshifter, and Omen of Clarity.
Feral go all the way down to Predatory Strikes. And then in Balance you’d go down to Improved Rejuvenation.
So this way you’d be focused on using Rejuv to soak up raid damage / party damage but you’d also be able to throw out the occasional big heal.
But this is just a theorycraft.
Powershifting (or catweaving as you call it) is a technique which was popularized on the private servers. It does higher DPS than just sitting in cat form waiting for your energy to regenerate, but at the cost of forcing you to manage your mana. You will be putting in extra effort for less DPS than a Rogue but if you want the extra challenge or are set on a Druid then go for it… just be aware you’ll get dumb people crapping on you in-game just for being Feral.