I was wondering if any of yall are taking advantage of this talent basically being a “free” defensive (costs 2 gcds, really) in times where you’re going to take damage and aren’t going to be attacking.
Seems like a quick swap to bearform and back to catform gives you 6 (staggered) seconds of an armor boost, health boost, and 10% damage taken converted into a hot that you recover. Even more benefit with fluid form doing the shifting, and getting an iron fur off cuz ya have the rage for it.
Just curious how that’s been applied in practice for yall. Cheers.
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It’s important to remember that Ursine Vigor+Ursoc’s Spirit stacks with Wildshape Mastery, and so does Ironfur. Since Frenzied Regeneration is % based on max health over 3s and the health stays with you for 4s after shifting into Bear Form, you’re essentially are getting 50% more out of the effect from manually casting Frenzied Regen too which is nice.
Delves: All the time. I run DotC in higher difficulty delves (10+) specifically because it’s the only way to survive the melee hits in there; particularly with maintaining Ironfur.
M+: I’ve been flipflopping on Wildstalker and DotC in M+ while trying to get a feel for my group and dungeon difficulty. DotC is definitely tankier if you know when to expect damage, but Wildshaper seems to be better at reacting to damage taken and sustain (from a survivability standpoint).
Raid: Something is definitely wrong if I’m going bear form in raid at all. I can say that’s it’s kept me alive on multiple attempts but usually it’s irrelevant at that point because everyone else is dead/dying.
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There’s a bit of a misconception in your setup here.
Auto attacking in cat form deals more damage than auto attacking in bear form as feral. If you are shifting into bear, you will lose out on that damage. It’s not ground breaking damage by any stretch, but still something you’d rather not lose.
If the damage you are expecting to take is going to be easily livable while in cat form, you’re still going to be better staying in cat form. If instead the incoming damage will be great enough to be threatening (or has domino effects with your healer needing to put more globals into allowing you to survive it), then you should be going bear form regardless. At that point, having Wildshape Mastery is a nice bonus to have.
Your post is true for the damage taken while we are auto attacking.
Damage is also received outside of auto attacking at times. At that point it might be a choice between bear’s tankiness and cat’s move speed, though (which could get you back to attack range sooner, ofc).
Sure, and in those cases going into bear form makes sense. But it also makes sense in those times to sit in bear form generally until you need Ursine Vigor or it’s time to attack again.
Please don’t misunderstand my response. Wildshape Mastery is a nice ability to have and popping into bear form while pooling when incoming damage is on the way can make sense. It’s just there is an opportunity cost to do so if you’re able to auto attack. There’s more nuance to the decision than simply pooling = bear form because of Wildshape Mastery.
Thanks for the breakdown! Very helpful.
I’m trying to wrap my head around parts of your first paragraph. Bear (heh) with me, just want to make sure I follow, so thought I’d break down a simplified scenario:
- In catform your max HP is 100hp. You currently have 50/100hp.
- Shift to bearform. Thanks to ursines vigor and spirit, your new max hp is 122hp. Your hp is now 61/122hp (I don’t believe it stays at 50hp, right?)
- Frenzied Regeneration is cast in bearform. It will heal for a total of 29hp over 3 seconds (instead of 24 it would have healed while in cat form). This brings you to 90/122hp.
- You shift back to catform, you now have 90/108hp (8 is 80% of the 10hp from bear form. I am assuming Ursine Vigor does not count as “bear form HP”, but it did help increase the heal of FR)
- After 6 seconds you lose your bear HP/armor, and are now 90/100hp.
After all that was said and done you end up healing for 40hp from frenzied regen because you went to bear form, whereas if you cast frenzied regen in catform without shifting, it would have only healed you for 24hp. That turns it from a 24% hp heal to a 40%. Nice.
Is all that correct? I know there’s some little assumptions that may have been off.
Cool to lay it all out in front me like that though to really get that figured out. Guides online really don’t break that down anywhere.
Yep, I didn’t mean to suggest to anyone to stop auto attacking in cat form. ESPECIALLY because cat attacks so much faster than bear, and auto attacks are what trigger Ravage procs. So good to make sure other folks popping in here don’t get the wrong idea to overly shift into bear.
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You have the general idea.
With the talents it’s closer to 55% extra hp in Bear Form (Ursoc’s is additive to Bear, Ursine Vigor & Fount of Strength are multiplicative). So:
100hp → 50/100hp
->Bear Form 78/155hp
->Frenzied Regen 32% of 155hp is ~50hp over 3s (instead of 32 as a cat)
→ 128/155hp
ALTERNATIVELY, and more importantly:
100hp → Bear Form → 155hp → then you eat your 50 damage hit
->105/155hp (much better than 78/155!)
->Frenzied Regen 32% of 155, + 6hp over 8s from Wildshaper
->161/155hp you full healed with extra left over
And that’s before armor mitigation. The idea is that you reduce the damage you take with bear form so that the value of the % heal is maximized. The extra hp from bear changes the relative size of the hits you’re taking even before we talk about armor mitigation. If magic hits for 50 on cat, it won’t suddenly become 75 on bears, it’s still 50 damage against the larger health pool. But this is then further helped by Wildshape Mastery’s effect that causes 10% of damage taken within 6s of Bear-swapping to also be healed. I haven’t tested but I think it’s also affected by the Verdant Heart talent in the Druid tree. So it’s 12% of the hit healed, the damage is reduced by the extra armor/mit from bear form, and then on top of that the damage is reduced by the relative change in hp from the swap.
Note that when the bonus hp is lost your health is converted back at the same relative %; so you can immediately swap back to catform if you’re not taking any more damage without losing the effectiveness of Frenzied Regen. The extra hp regen from bear form is only relevant if you’re taking consistent damage (such as something like the abom aura damage on 3rd boss of Necrotic Wake where the extra 600k health from the bigger FrRe and % relative damage reduction from staying in bear form might matter).