That’s where I started with my new keybind setup. I normally use bear form as a defensive and sometimes I need to swap to bear form more conventionally. As an example, if you remember back in Shadowlands Castle Nathria when Sludgefist does his charge into the pillars that does a ton of physical damage. So it’s nice to have bear form’s armor at the time of impact. But since he’s running away from you and you’re chained to a partner, it’s not practical to swap using Mangle since the boss isn’t in melee range.
That’s a fairly nuanced example but the point is that it’s not uncommon for there to be a mechanic I want to be in bear form for but for whatever reason using the melee range Mangle isn’t practical. For those cases I still use the Bear Form spell, but since that’s something I would consider an edge case, I put it on a more out-of-the-way keybind and changed the more convenient keybind I used to use for Bear Form to Mangle.
I ended up just adding Mangle to my defensive macro for cases where I’m in melee (Balance Perspective):
#showtooltip
/use [form:1]Frenzied Regeneration;[mod:Alt]Mangle;[mod:ctrl]Bear Form;[mod:shift]Renewal;Barkskin
With muscle memory I’ll probably still end up hitting ctrl until I remember I can get in a free attack.
I don’t like how I have to mess with my main bars just to fit balance spells. It would’ve been nice if they just kept boomie form but kept the concept of fluid
Saves a global but again what if you want to go cat form and start swiping. Now your burning 35-40 energy to get into cat form with that talent. Its a mess.
If the energy is more useful at that moment then the free damage/combo points, then just use cat form… but I will say the times when you will get more out of swipe/brutal slash or thrash compared to a rake + 1 or 2 CP will be few and far between. And like I said, if you aren’t going to value that flexibility, then just don’t take the talent.
The point I was making is that the reason a druid might want the talent has more to do with the free GCDs you get rather than any impact on keybinds.
Say you want to go bear form as a way to defensive for a boss aoe and your out of range for mangle to hit how are you switching if you don’t have bear form on another hot key?
And what if you want to go cat form to swipe an aoe pack but u have to burn 35-40 energy on rake or shred to enter cat form. That saved global is no longer useful as the energy loss makes up for it.
And again,
if you had shred on #1 key (cat ability)
mangle on your #2 key (bear ability)
moonfire on #3 key (no form ability)
It saves a global but its all over the place. Best way I can explain this is most of time when your in cat form you want to rake, shred then rip. So 1 2 3 on the keyboard would be fluid, not keybinds 1, t, q (random) because as mentioned above the keys to switch forms can no longer be same hotkey. (example mangle and shred)
i
Where as my macro:
My 1 keys is moonfire, rake, mangle,
My 2 key is sunfire, shred, maul
all depending on what form I’m in. Its alot more “fluid” IMO
Again hard to explain or atleast im not good at explaining but hope it makes sense.
2 Likes
So mangle has to hit in order for fluid form to work? I thought just hitting the mangle key would switch you into bear form whether or not you actually hit your target or not. Not that it matters for me because my macro has bear form and mangle combined. But the issue has always been in pvp when I switched, I’d have two global cooldowns from the bear form switch to using the mangle.
I’d rather get rid of that macro and just place mangle on my keybind to switch to bear form, but if it doesn’t switch unless your in melee range for the mangle to hit… yea, that’s an issue for those not using the macro.
Basically what I have, here let me give you example of one of my keybinds (I write myself)
/cast [@mouseover,dead] rebirth
/cast [@mouseover,help,exists][mod:alt,@player][@target,help,exists] rejuvenation
/cast [stance:0] moonfire
/cast [stance:1] mangle
/cast [stance:2] rake
/cast [stance:3] moonfire
/cast [stance:4] moonfire
/stopspelltarget
So if I take the talent, now Rake and mangle cannot be on the same hotkey. So it makes it where I would have to have an extra key.
Yea, I can see where there would a problem there. I keep my macros simple. When I want to switch to bear form and mangle I use this simple macro:
#showtooltip Mangle
/cast [nostance:1] !Bear Form
/cast [stance:1] Mangle
When I want to switch back to cat form I use this. I got chatgpt to add the prowl in there to save me a wasted keybind for prowl. This one is mandatory for those who pvp as feral. It’s also useful for solo pve.
#showtooltip Rake
/cancelaura Travel Form
/use !Prowl
/use [nostealth, noform:2] Cat Form
/cast Rake
When I’m doing pvp and constantly snared, I just hit those two keybinds back and forth to break the snares while still getting in some attacks. Fluid form is literally saving me a global cooldown for the mangle and a global cooldown for the rake.
Cleaner bars, I dont need rake shred mangle on bars. So your right I have fixed bars that dont switch.
Yea I’ve been playing around with Fluid Form and Feral and I think they should add Swipe/Brutal Slash to the list for Fluid Form
Just wanted to update this because it no longer works in the current patch. The new macro that works is:
#showtooltip Rake
/cancelform [form:4]
/cast [noform:2] Cat Form
/cast !Prowl
/cast [form:2] Rake