Ah this is neat. I didn’t see this part in the blue post, and seeing as they had different “paths”, I figured it was pick your flavor. This kinda changes things a little. And yeah, we’ll be pushing Legion type numbers with all these tunings.
Is this like Build-A-Berserk with 20 talentpoints?
We haven’t seen what they will do to our regular talent trees yet, but the hope would be less Beserk talents among other things.
We’ll have to wait to see that stuff, sadly.
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The Capstone - Claw rampage. I’m assuming swipe also means brutal slash in regards to gaining a 25% chance to proc Massive attack?
Also Massiave attack is a frontal Aoe. ( doesn’t say how far in front of you, is this enhanced with Astral influence talent ) I hope this doesn’t break CC in PVP…
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Funny how I made a post not too long ago suggesting the whole “keeping health and armor for a few second upon entering cat form” and everyone tore the idea apart like it was the absolute worst thing they’d ever heard.
And here we are. I’m stoked about it. But it’s hilarious that others are too. As long as it’s a Blizz idea and not a community idea.
-_-
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People have been asking for them to expand on Ursine Vigor for quite some time
This is actually so hype. I’ve always felt like feral is just the red headed step child rogue spec. Like it always feels a couple expansions behind in terms of design when it comes to energy and combo management. But I like the notion that, rather than just copy rogue mechanics, lean into what makes feral unique! If anything I’d like this spec to enable using your “off” form more! Oh how I’d love to just swap to bear for a mangle and maul everytime I run out of energy as cat.
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How about me. Can I talk about how much it sucks? Rip has no synergies. Looking at this, I’m not even convinced it’s a dps gain to use it on cd. The risk is not worth the reward. And the risk is huge.
It’s great for cat, but they’re obviously trying to push bears into the moonlight. And I’m not a fan of that thematically.
It needs to be closer to 300%, apply to all targets and the previous node needs to be 100% of health and armor and swapping back gives you 25 rage. Otherwise, it’s a dead talent. 4% magic DR is better imho.
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Agreed.
Hmm, don’t know about that. You keep IronFur, Frenzied Regen, and keep 80% of “bear form” armor and health. 2 stacks of IronFur in cat, ~(17k x 0.8 + 2 x 14k) = 41k, would be equivalent to more than 1 stack of IronFur in bear, ~(17k+14k) = 31k. There are many places in M+ and Heroic Raid where you could be actively tanking and swap to cat. There are also places you shouldn’t for sure.
It does need more of an incentive besides a possible nominal dps increase in single target.
My feedback after reading these talents and thinking on them.
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Massive attacks on RNG will either make it where its procing all the time or not at all and it makes for boring game play. It needs a better way to proc via player action rather than RNG (kinda like BloodTalons from feral).
Also i would like to see Primal Wrath and Raze added to abilities usable to spend the proc. -
Fount of Strength- if we are getting an ilvl squish going into TWW we might want to increase the amount of maximum health.
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Wildshape Mastery- Atm its a Feral only talent. yes guardian can use it to get a “speed boost” but its majorly a dead talent for Guardian. I would like to see something also not to do with Shifting shapes in a tank spec because if you make one mistake even with the “extra” time its not good.
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Empowered Shapeshifting/Wildpower surge- Empowered has nice features for feral as its a survival bonus. Guardian like the reduction to magic but it’s leaning more towards feral, would like to see Trash added to the damage increase of abilities as its a source of bear damage/aggro.
The Surge part is worthless in full honesty, its a dps talent around weaving in the other form for dmg which overall will just be a waste of gcds doing the shifting because the damage gained doesn’t outway the risk of doing it outside of when a Tank is an offtank not doing a raid boss -
Ruthless Aggression/Killing Strikes - The Ruthless is nice seeing as Massive Attack triggers off melee attacks however it will only work out if we trigger massive attacks enough to keep the bonus.
Killing Strikes its giving a nice agility (main stat) buff at the same time buffing defensive of Iron Fur of guardian. but we don’t know how good massive strikes are to even attempt to farm out atm making the increase for auto-attack speed for only 6 seconds unknown worth over which would be better to take at any given time. -
Pack’s Endurance- this disappoints me because unless there’s more to it that we haven’t seen then its pointless and dead. it adds only 2 seconds atm. I would like to see something else here as well… range? a different ability added to it like a mark of the wild buff? just something else
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Tear Down the Mighty- why those 2 talents… they are both cap stones that are going to be niche in TWW… unless you plan to have talent reworks to make them more easily gotten to and a reason that they are getting 5 seconds off their cd… would rather see a different talent and that just baked into the class if your thinking it should be a talent.
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Claw Rampage- would like to see something neater here. Yea the berserk part is nice but would like something else that feels like a true capstone for the tree. Right now it feels like a way to skip over procing issues that the tree might face with a yea another burst window system
Overall i’m kind disappointed in this hero tree. Unless the massive strikes really make it an overwhelming power for bear its hard losing to the arcane which has extra rage generation (which is both damage and defensive), the leech for extra healing, and overall effectiveness as the arcane isn’t proc’d base for the main abilities. Also this change looks to make changes to the physical trees to make easy of use of hero (arcane uses Fury of Elune which Guardian doesn’t have)
What i would like to see is the proc removed for something the player can activate themself or be reworked and the talents relooked at to limit shapeshifting in and out of bear (very niche when the OT can deal dps in raids and very unlikely in M+), and fix dead ones that have no real purpose (Pack’s Endurance example)
Also- Until testing is done we don’t have numbers so its all speculation which is kinda hard to tell if anything needs actual balancing numbers wise or playing wise until we are able to actually test
Oh goodness, I ignored that alt and that spammer fotm guy and the forums are alot cleaner.
The irony of course is I’m pretty sure I’ve said multiple times that I’m playing my DK this tier, 6/9 M, and my bear has taken a backseat until either 10.2.7 or 11.0
But, no surprise, when they are wrong, they just scream personal attacks.
Oh well, at least the forums are cleaner without their presence.
Also, the irony is that if they were not just fotm rerolls, they’d recognize me from the forums as much as I recognize you Kaer. There are some bears on here that if they disagree with what I think, I actually consider it… fotm’s are not on that list.
1 Like
Oh man, the irony. Hasn’t been able to show any proof or evidence to any claim you make and yet the only thing you respond with is personal attacks. Don’t imagine a straight face was held while this was being said.
You literally joined the beginning of DF. LFR’d a few bosses last season of BFA and last season of SL. Finally started actually playing Druid at the start of DF.
Not to mention you didn’t play DK until S2 when you thought they were going to be the Meta tank because of their tier set. And followed through making it your main and giving your Druid a “back seat” because DK gets a legendary this season.
So cute. So blissfully ignorant and self sure. The world needs more of your confidence. But needs less of the “run away and ignore people I can’t disprove” attitude. But thus is the way of the internet.
Anyway… gonna do a full feedback post on this tree from a Guardian PoV now that I’ve had time to think about it for a bit
This post will be consolidating some of the major issues I’ve already mentioned with respect to cat DPS, seeing if there’s any clarity on blizz’s ideas for Guardian bearcat DPS, and posting feedback on individual talents in the tree, both bearcat focused and the talents explicitly targeting bear form.
Major concerns regarding cat form for Guardian
First off, some points that I’ve already mentioned that need adjustment:
- Guardian druid is currently not immune to critical strikes in PvE while in cat form. Wildshape Mastery buffing our tankiness in cat form will never be relevant outside of trivial content if this is not fixed.
- Guardian druids can be parried in PvE while in cat form. This isn’t a huge power loss, but is very annoying and should be fixed in this tree if bearcat DPS is expected to be a thing at all.
- Guardian druids only receive our leather specialization bonus (+5% stamina) while in bear form. This is extra tankiness lost by entering cat form, and honestly makes no sense and should be applied to the spec regardless of form.
- We currently are set to 25 rage when entering bear form. This is problematic if we’re intended to be able to shift while tanking, particularly as old ironfurs will be losing duration while in cat form. Upping this to 50 rage while this tree is selected allows an instant ironfur/maul cast, while having enough rage to frenzied regeneration as well. This may be best tied to Wildpower Surge procs just to avoid any potential degenerate gameplay, but I think it’s reasonable to always have this effect with this tree.
Bearcat DPS as a concept
Has there been any thought from Blizzard’s side as to how they want bearcat DPS to function in practice?
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Should we expect something similar to legion pre-patch / early legion DPS, which involved frequently switching back and forth between cat and bear form, entering cat form to dump energy whenever possible, returning to bear form to regen energy, maintain thrash stacks, and dumping harder-hitting abilities (mangle, maul). At the time Guardian could not tank in cat form, sure, but off-tanking or otherwise just doing target-dummy DPS involved constant switching of forms.
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Alternatively, are we only intended to enter cat form with Wildpower Surge active, and otherwise have pure bear form be the optimal way to DPS? I believe this is the better approach (as it’s a much more understandable DPS rotation, and lets people opt out by not taking the talent), and I assume it’s the intent, but it also demands a very strong proc to justify spending 2 globals shapeshifting, and it doesn’t really do that right now.
I also want to point out that power creep within an expansion (class changes, tier sets, other potential forms of borrowed power) understandably tend to focus on bear form abilities specifically. This is how feral affinity DPS went from ~40% increased target dummy DPS in the legion prepatch to maybe a few % by the end of legion, and is a large part of why it was done in Nighthold but not Antorus. Obviously Legion had a ton of borrowed power in the artifact + legendaries, but it’s still worth keeping in mind that having this sort of playstyle will require things like Wildpower Surge to be adjusted perhaps multiple times during the expansion.
Massive Attack in general, or, "someone realized this is just Tooth and Claw, right?"
Seriously, it’s a chance on auto-attack to cause your next maul to deal increased damage, and apply a debuff to the target for 6s that makes it deal less damage to you. Sure you can extend that debuff, and it deals increased damage in some additional ways, but it’s only slightly facetious to call this talent tree Tooth and Claw.
I don’t even necessarily think it’ll end up feeling bad or anything, but the blatant overlaps with an effect that already exists are kinda bizarre. It does make one wonder if there are any spec changes that can be expected here, or if there’s just a lack of ideas for what to do with us. Also feels slightly like a bummer not having any meaningful interactions with mangle in the tree (bar Wildpower Surge… sort of), which is an ability that is clearly signaled to be strong in the kit (we refresh it with our other abilities and have several talents buffing it) but which has been mediocre for a long time.
- Individual Talent Feedback
Won’t touch every talent but I’ll give feedback on most of them here:
Fount of Strength
20 max energy is very minor, but it does all but guarantee we won’t ever worry about energy in cat form unless we are shifting abnormally often. 20 max rage exists, it’s not really strong but it’s not bad either, mostly feels like flavor for the tree.
This is potentially a good place to add additional rage on entering bear form if it is not added to Wildpower Surge.
10% max health on FR… exists. It’s not really a strong enough effect to notice and FR’s duration is very short, but it’s there and will make us slightly better I suppose.
Consider either upping the max health % this grants if the goal is to have FR be a good EH button, or have it also extend the duration of FR by 1s; likely going to overheal most of the time, but extends the amount of time spent at high health per FR cast and also extends the duration of the health/healing received buffs that go with it.
Wildshape Mastery
Add Rage of the Sleeper to the list of effects not removed by cat form. It is not up universally like ironfur, but it’s another defensive tool that would otherwise restrict us to bear form for its duration.
Change the duration of the cat form armor and HP buffs to 6.5s, or at least have the duration be x.5s (where x is like 5 or 6). Having the duration end in .5s means there will always be a fixed # of cat globals you can spend before needing to shift back into bear form, regardless of haste. At 6s, you can always use 4 cat abilities, but can fit in a 5th if you have 50+% haste (e.g. during bloodlust) to lower the initial shapeshift global below 1s. At 6.5s, you can always fit in exactly 5 cat form abilities, regardless of haste on the initial shapeshift cast.
This is a small change, and possibly unnecessary if it’s not worth it DPS-wise to spend extra globals in cat form, but would be cleaner gameplay-wise.
I don’t really have an opinion on the 10% healing from damage taken when going cat->bear. It just sort of feels like it exists and we won’t really notice it or care.
Empowered Shapeshifting/Wildpower Surge
Empowered Shapeshifting is boring other than the use of FR in cat form (which is understandably extremely niche for Guardian, it’s obviously Feral-focused, but I still think it’s cool). That said I think this is fine and having a boring passive “Bear Form is a little better” talent is good for people who want to use this tree but not feel forced into cat form while tanking.
Wildpower Surge:
As mentioned in the section on bearcat DPS, I think it makes the most sense if this effect is the only time you’d want to entering cat form to DPS while tanking. On that note, I like that gaining the proc is tied to actually casting Mangle; it forces you to spend time DPSing in bear form to gain the effect, and if the effect is strong that further incentivizes not spending time in cat form outside of the proc.
This does mean the proc actually needs to be strong, though, since it’s coming with the opportunity cost of 2 shapeshift globals dealing 0 damage and cat form is otherwise not much better damage than bear form. Instant 5 CPs is a good effect, but a single 50% boosted rip is not really that strong.
Thoughts, depending on how long of a cat form pattern you want, could be:
“on entering cat form, gain 5 CPs, and your next Rip or Ferocious Bite cast deals % increased damage for its full duration and also casts Massive Attack (Ferocious Bite version) at your target as if it spent full CPs and energy.”
Leading to the pattern of Cat Form → Rip/FB → (likely rake) → Bear Form
or:
“on entering cat form, gain 5 CPs, and your next Rip, Rake, Shred, and Ferocious Bite attacks are empowered: Rip/FB deal % increased damage for their full duration. Shred/Rake generate 1 additional CP and deal damage as if they were cast from stealth.”
pattern is Cat Form → Rip → Rake → Shred → FB → Bear Form
I like the former because I like the idea of casting massive attack from both forms. Regardless, the biggest point is that this proc should do very good damage to justify the time spent shapeshifting.
Ruthless Aggression/Killing Strikes
This is a choice between a 6s buff after massive attack, or a 6s buff after massive attack. Except one of them also has a guaranteed massive attack proc at the start of combat tacked on.
Why is this a choice node? Neither buff is really strong enough to have a noticeable effect on playstyle. As it is now it’s just going to be a math problem. I don’t think this talent is any worse if you just pick one of the buffs, put the guaranteed proc on mangle on that talent, and just put it down as a non-choice node.
I would probably pick the swing speed buff as that feels more synergistic with the rest of the tree, tune it however is needed, and call it good.
Aggravate Wounds
Why do only bear form abilities extend this? Yes, we only apply Dreadful Wound in bear form (currently), but it’s not unreasonable that it would still be up sometimes while we’re spending a Wildpower Surge proc. Separate tooltips for the specs still make sense as Feral doesn’t have Maul (bar whatever the PVP talent ability is called) or Raze, but it doesn’t feel necessary to not let us extend this DoT in cat form, nor to not allow Feral to extend it in bear form.
This doesn’t really feel like a strong talent either way so this doesn’t really matter much, but it just feels lame for the tree that’s sort of emphasizing shapeshifting to deliberately have things not work while shapeshifted to the other form.
Strike for the Heart/ Tear Down the Mighty
Strike for the Heart is very much filler. I don’t really have any other comments on it.
Tear Down the Mighty is not going to see use at a mere 5s CDR, but it could if the CDR were a lot higher and/or it made Pulverize a stronger general-purpose button; Pulverize is actually a pretty strong damage reduction skill, it just suffers from having strong competition for its talent cost and not really hitting meaningfully hard.
It does feel hard to imagine this seeing play often or at all if it doesn’t make pulverize a meaningful damage button on top of the CDR though.
Claw Rampage
First, I’ll pout that you made a tree that enables kitty-convoke to be used safely whenever desired, and then you made the capstone focused on Berserk/Incarnation
Second, add Maul to the list of abilities that can proc this effect. This currently works fine if you really need to play defensively during Berserk/Incarnation, but if you’re trying to maximize damage with it, not having Maul in this effect is going to lead to one of 2 outcomes:
- Either Maul is still worth pressing for maximum damage, resulting in significantly fewer massive attack procs from Claw Rampage as many of Berserk’s/Incarnation’s globals will be spent on Maul
- Or, it is better to fish for procs during Berserk/Incarnation using other abilities, and dumping rage into Ironfur for Thorns of Iron damage. Which creates a weird situation of not using your damage-dealing rage spender for maximum damage.
Also it would just be really fun to get back-to-back Massive Attack procs (although I do think it would be fair if Massive Attack does not have the 25% chance to trigger this effect)
6 Likes
Sure, once you learn how to play the class. Good lord…
> [Kaercha - Area 52 - Warcraft Logs](https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/area-52/kaercha#difficulty=5)
2 Likes
That is the greatest thing I’ve seen all day. You’re so cute! I just wanna pat you on the head for a good try.
Now go play outside while the adults are talking.
3 Likes
This tree is really interesting and lots to cover, going to focus on Wildpower Surge here in the essence of time and to break things up but I have put out a detailed video going over the tree for Feral if I may shill it here that I’ll eventually convert to feedback when I can.
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Really like this for Bear, obviously besides Crit immunity (which may just simply not be mentioned to avoid tooltip bloat / it’s a preview), lower HP/armor values seem fine and a bit of risk/reward is great in my opinion, would be silly if you could tank just as well in Cat.
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There’s definitely some bosses in M+ you could weave this. Always the option to pair Barkskin with this too, just great decisions to be made in general.
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Nice that Bear can now benefit from Ursine Vigor now too when shifting back into form that mitigates potential Ironfur drop off + health benefit and the heal.
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It would be great if off-spec Convokes were viable for Bear like in Shadowlands, it was incredibly fun and having the choice between 4 Convokes with different strengths/uses was fantastic + a bit of risk-reward behaviour e.g. pulling certain packs with Moonkin Convoke.
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^ Not saying these should be tied to either Hero tree though, just make Convoke stand on its own for Bear once again, cause right now it’s really fun as Resto being able to decide between 3 different versions of Convoke in M+.
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These short, limited shifting uses like Convoke and Wildpower Surge work so well (edit + HOTW window… HOTW Catform is really fun).
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Aggravate Wounds (extension) should apply to Cat abilities as Bear too including ones cast by Convoke. Bear can also make use of the lower GCD in Catform to dump their energy for a more lengthy extension. On that note I do think Aggravate Wounds is a very interesting node in general and hopefully 0.4s is just an initial low placeholder value but won’t focus on it here.
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Glad to see it’s a choice-node giving people the option, the haters have an alternative and don’t let them discourage you from experimenting with this! Previous versions of catweave Bear have been among the best versions of Bear and this has more QOL than ever as it stands.
That’s all I’ll dare to say for Guardian here given I am main spec Feral in raid, so take that as you will. But big Guardian enjoyer in other content.
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I’m going to make the assumption this is intended to be throughput and the 100% value was just a simple, first comes to mind placeholder value, given the alternative node has throughput as well. In which case I am very pleased, but a few things to cover.
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8 stacks maybe seems a bit low (preview I know) where it might be too frequent, obviously would need to test to see how it feels but not too frequent + big Bear nuke sounds like the most appealing way to go about this rather than frequent little nukes. E.g. averages every 45s or so (numbers out of thin air).
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Cat 1.0s GCD → Bear 1.5 (including Shapeshift GCDs) will be the biggest complaint among people I imagine and yeah I am of the opinion lowering it to 1.0 for consistency or any kind of middle ground e.g. hasting it or 1.25 or improvement of some kind. edit: Brutal Slash is 1.0 GCD in Bear so I would say it’s just shapeshifting GCDs that is the concern.
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Bear Brutal Slash has some nice synergy with the Swipe Crit node and assume it can also extend Aggravate Wounds (please higher than 0.4s though!). E.g. you Massive Attack, dump your energy into extending Aggravate Wounds, then when you’re out of energy you go Bear for yet another hit and another extension, then back into Cat and you’ve got some energy again.
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Just fantastic potential here, it’s simple enough you just go Bear and press one GCD but the tree creates optimal timings to do so.
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Make this hit more like Legion Brutal Slash if possible, given the cost of weaving Bear / natural CD via stacks. Obviously the alternative choice isn’t that powerful in terms of throughput so may be limited in achieving this but 100% is obviously quite low.
8 Likes
Edit: saw my mistake. Carry on haha
I can see the swapping working for cat in a slightly better fashion, as you can burn all your energy, swap to bear, and your energy keeps regenning.
For bear, meh, you’d have to put a rediculous modifer on the rip to make it worthwhile along with making the rest of the tree work with it.
Currently its decent risk for minimal to nonexistent reward.
First of all great post in general mate, just thought I’d add: Wildpower Surge, Cat/Bomker-Convokes, and Heart of the Wild (HOTW Catform is really fun when Resto kittyweaving with the somewhat recently reworked effect) could all be at the very least the limited windows IMO. Going into Cat to only ever press Rip and come back out is maybe a bit too limited.
You are way too fixated on placeholder numbers, and no if anything the node has way more potential for Bear in terms of gameplay and decisions.
I had a gander of some previous posts and you and Kaercha, the two complaining most about Catweaving, also didn’t play much Guardian Druid last xpac in the seasons where Cat/Boomie weaving was a thing with Convoke (and this is just one recent example of fun weaving gameplay for Guardian, go back through almost every xpac you can find examples). Maybe open yourself up to trying something new because it seems like you didn’t even experience the most recent great iteration of it.
Otherwise choice node exists for you if you want the status quo, pick the other option and move on you don’t need to reply to literally every single post that mentions something positive about Catweaving.
Anyway that’s me for Guardian stuff I have shared my two cents.
6 Likes
Oh one more thing: Wildpower Surge could really work both ways, e.g. as Guardian if I kittyweave a bit or Catvoke casts a bunch of Shreds, it should count towards stacks to amping a Bear ability. Likewise as Feral after I do x amount of Bear shifts+ability my next finisher does 50% extra damage. Even if it takes several minutes to ramp up and is just a minor benefit that’s fine why not add the cherry on top to this node and integrate the two.
Don’t see the point in having it seperated as a Feral version and a Guardian version. Just merge them but two different buffs, that aren’t mutually exclusive, can have stacks of both at same time as you swap between forms, one that builds to amping the Cat ability and one that builds towards amping the Bear ability.
The synergy would be unreal.
3 Likes