I’ve spent some time snooping around and looking at the old information strewn about the internet to help confirm or deny my suspicions, and I think I found several sources that definitively shows that the current implementation of energy that we have is actually not true to TBC and should be altered to more closely resemble how energy actually worked in 2.4.3, the patch that TBC Classic is being modeled around.
Specifically you’ll be looking at post #20 on page 1 of this ElitestJerks feral thread which I rooted out, circa October 2007 just after patch 2.2 hit. Patch 2.2 landed in September of 2007 and is known to be when the changed energy mechanics were first noticed. Here is an image of a blue referencing a poster on the old wow forums asking about it while 2.2 was on PTR:
https ://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/225638945549975563/816072640896827412/unknown.png
is it an intended ‘fix’ that our powershifting has been nerfed…
Delete the space after “p” or “s” preceding the colons in “http/s :”.
https ://web.archive.org/web/20081007045310/http ://elitistjerks.com:80/f31/t16902-feral_druid_megathread/
After the powershift/Mangle you’re now sitting at 0 energy at worst, or a partial tick amount of energy at best (due to the changes in energy tick mechanics). Whereas a Rip/Mangle at ~80 energy means you’ll have ~30 energy leftover (80 - 30(Rip) - 40(Mangle) + 20(tick)) from the inevitable tick that would have happened in that time.
This post is implying that some sort of partial energy refund existed, and that you were left with a partial tick amount of energy in cat form, in a “best case”.
As long as this partial tick was at the very least 4 energy, this would give druids a double shred rotation, just needing to wait the energy tick for the 2nd shred, which isn’t really that big of a deal and would be a massive improvement over what is currently implemented in prepatch.
What I do know is that we are not getting any partial energy other than the +1 or -1 bug that Blizzard has acknowledged.
Please look at the following link from old Wowhead threads circa 2008. Credit to Schwifty of the Druid discord for helping to root these out. Please focus on specifically posts #6 and post #9:
https ://www.wowhead.com/forums/topic/powershifting-huh-26934
Post #6
That is cool. I did not know you could health pot powershift while tanking. I’ll have to play a macro for that. I knew about the energy powershift. This is easiest with a energy timer. You have to get used to doing it with a latency issue. If you powershift too late, even being within the tick, you have the risk of losing out if it lags too long and doesn’t register cat before the energy tick.
Post #9
(He’s obviously super wrong about powershifting in general but it’s still relevant)
I honestly dont think powershifting is worth it. You should already be watching your mangle, rip and energy total throughout a fight, its too hard to time the energy tick right before you powershift, but it can be done. If you can manage watching everything and still dpsing and doing the proper things in the fight, go for it.
The following, a guide on Ownedcore, circa 2008:
https ://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-guides/137778-guide-feral-druid.html
Powershifting
Many people ask what powershifting is. The basics: Furor gives the player 40 energy when they switch out of form and back in. This means you can shift out and in for a net gain of 40 energy, every time. This is essentially a conversion of Mana to Energy, as it will always cost you mana to shift. By timing the shift you can make it so you lose as little energy as possible (from the residual energy in your bar when you shift and the energy you lose while out of form), and this is essentially the skill of Powershifting. By doing it correctly you should be able to gain about 30-35 energy, and even doing it badly the gains should be in the region of 20 energy or so, although it is possible to gain no energy or even lose energy if you do it badly. By doing this you can gain a decent amount of DPS, an general analysis of the DPS gain you can expect follows
You’ll see here he is referencing a similar “best and worst case scenario” situation similar to the post I found on the wayback EJ thread, and even gives some values that are impossible for us to verify but they are significant values nonetheless. So these two posts logically align. This post literally outlines how energy was partially refunded depending on how you timed your shift.
In TBC.
These all point to something, all from different sources during the post 2.2 era, that I think are pretty definitive:
There was some kind of variable partial energy refund for timing shifts with the energy tick.
This means that the current implementation of energy in the TBC prepatch is incorrect and in the strongest but most polite terms, I think it is imperative that it be looked at, and subsequently changed to better match actual TBC mechanics so that the integrity of the Feral druid playstyle is not immensely compromised by neglecting to fix this.
Thanks for reading, Blizz.
