Not that I doubt you, since I agree it’s more likely than not that they’re going to do significant work with the Druid trees come TWW, but what about the hero talents specifically makes you think that?
More on the spec side, but Massive Attack is a copy/paste of Apex Predator and Raze
And then theres the play on Ursine Vigor with the Shape-shifting talent for Druid of the Claw.
I havent looked into the other options much to pull ideas and examples from there.
Or its all wishful.thinking
Oh look at that, a Druid talent tree rework. https://www.wowhead.com/news/class-and-talent-tree-reworks-in-the-war-within-alpha-druids-monks-paladins-338751#druid
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I’ve only glanced at the rework preview, but I just want to say thank you to Blizz and thank you to everyone in this thread who continued to raise the volume on this issue. Many of the things we have suggested seem to have directly made their way into this rework.
Thank you all, fantastic work everyone.
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While the tree definitly fixes some of the major problems like moving lyraca down to 2 points its still lacking the diagonal mobility the dps specs need to reach the capstones.
They also added more 2 more gates to the capstones with those passive 2 pointers.
Its like they couldnt just improve the tree; they added a couple new treats and fixed 1 or 2 problems we’ve been really vocal about but then added a bunch more bloat so we’d be just as blocked in.
Also they made swarm feral only which is really sad as a resto who loves it. They just reworked the visual and added a glyph for it, why remove it and replace it with a dps only mini cooldown.
Also still 7 dead end talents, and a bunch of those, the talent before them as only the dead end as a deeper connection.
Then there is a bunch of points where from one talent you get to go to 2 which only connect to the same talent further.
To me this feels more like an aesthetic change rather than any change of substance given the critiques in this thread.
Look at me, i’m a prophet! lol
So much to review. The general tree looks “better”. A quick glance at it shows it still has bloat problems and the bottom half has very specialized paths with no lateral movement.
Hard to say for sure, but it looks like “better”, but not “good”.
I posted this in the Druid of the Claw feedback thread, but reposting here to get the conversation going…
So looking specifically at the Druid class tree rework that just got revealed in the context of Druid of the Claw…
It is insanely difficult to get abilities for bear-weaving and utility at the same time.
The main culprit for this is Fluid Form. This talent is just about required if you’re going to run the bear weaving set but it’s buried behind the 2-point Lore of the Grove, which is itself pretty far away from where Ferals/Guardians are going to be spending the bulk of their points. The new tree is much better than the old in that key situational utility talents (like Remove Curse, Cyclone, and Hibernate) are much cheaper to get… but our builds are encouraging us to spread our points too thin.
To make the bearweaving set work as a core defensive utility, I want to grab Ursine Vigor, Ironfur, Instincts of the Claw, and Heart of the Wild. After grabbing all of those I have spent a whopping 29/21 class talent points. Granted this path was also forced to grab all of the baseline Feral talents you want, but there’s virtually no utility in here at all. I’m one point away from grabbing Nature’s Vigil, Innervate, Incapacitating Roar, Maim, Typhoon, and Cyclone… but I only have two more points to spend on utility so this sort of undoes a lot of what Dragonflight did with granting Feral access to premier Druid utility. And Astral Influence is simply out of the question, which is a shame. Our points are simply spread too thin.
I do think that this rework fixes a lot of Feral’s access to defensive utility though. Even though I wasn’t able to reach Verdant Heart, Matted Fur, Oakskin, or Well-Honed Instincts, I think that making Bear Form a more practical defensive option helps a lot with our personal survivability. Plus I like the option to talent into Forestwalk in situations where Improved Stampeding Roar isn’t needed. Along with taking Natural Recovery on the way to Fluid Form, we’re going to have a lot more healing received.
I still feel like the tree asks us to take too many dead talents. In order to take Fluid Form, I’m forced to take Rejuvenation and Wild Growth… which I will never use. Combine this with the 2 talent points for Lore of the Grove and that’s 4 talent points that are actively not benefiting me. This tree would feel a lot better with 4 more points of wiggle room so I would love to not have to take those. I also really really don’t want to go back to the days where Innervate is prohibitively expensive for Feral.
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Can I ask why Fluid form would be necessary? If I’m understanding it correctly, you can use mangle in any form BUT it shifts you into bear form when using it, kind of like prowl/dash. So all in all, just seems like it saves one global cooldown. Not really ground breaking.
If you’re gonna regularly be swapping forms, not having to spend that extra global is gonna really add up over time.
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It leans so much into quality of life that it feels like it should be baseline or up as the floating connector node where wildcharge was. It pretty much just removes some gcd bloat from shapeshifting, It’ll definitly smooth out druid of the claw but for everyone else its more of a convinence factor and is an odd choice for a near capstone.
Also itd be nice if they added skullbash to the list of spells it works on now that its more accessible, interrupts should be instant and it being locked behind a form prevents that.
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The benefit of fluid form is it solves having to spend a global to get into a form. Currently, you can use a cast sequence macro to do the job of this talent, but it’s the time that’s the issue.
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Oh look, another amazing write up - I can’t wait to see it all ignored.
Lenitas already said it, but with the talent in Druid of the Claw that encourages us to swap to Bear Form every so often for damage, saving a GCD swapping to bear and then saving another on the swap back to cat will be a significant amount of saved GCDs over the course of a fight. This is a direct damage increase.
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I kind of feel like Fluid Form should be where Ursol’s Vortex/Mass Entangle is honestly. It might not be great for PvE Feral because with the previewed tree as it is now, Feral gets more utility than Balance finally through access to both Ursol’s Vortex/Mass Entangle and Mighty Bash/Incapacitating Roar, where as Balance probably isn’t going to reach Bash/Roar.
But Fluid Form really feels like it belongs in a central location to all Druids. Especially because of Druid of the Claw - but really because of all of the hero trees introducing this notion of crossover specs and forms.
I would just like to add that I am over the moon about our issues being addressed.
The one issue that I think remains is that the mobility arms race is quickly passing us by. With Death Knights about to be running around on their mounts, Warriors giving themselves Freedom with every Charge, and Demon Hunters/Monks still having their insane mobility, I think it’s possible that Feral might become one of the least mobile melee - as crazy as that sounds. I guess Enhancement might be less mobile, but…
I anticipate that Balance and Restoration Druids will be largely unhappy with the new placement of the Wild Charge/Tiger Dash node. I think that an answer to this is to simply make Wild Charge baseline - as it really feels like it should have been for a long time now - and make that node either grant Tiger Dash or a second charge of Wild Charge.
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I agree. The bottom sections of the tree look like they want the left side to be capstones that are easy for the physical specs, the right are capstones that are easy for the magical specs, and the center is more core Druid stuff that focuses on form swapping. (Eg. Lycara’s and Heart of the Wild.) With that in mind, Fluid Form belongs in the center, not the right.
I would still be upset about Nature’s Vigil and Innervate (two of my favorite new Feral buttons) being so expensive, but there’s an easier argument for them being right side than Fluid Form.
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You can already macro that since unlike Rake/Shred/Mangle, Skull Bash is oGCD. I have it macro’d to shift me to cat and then Skull Bash (assuming I’m not already in Bear.)
That said, I can get behind making that baked-in functionality of Skull Bash rather than asking people to macro it.
I have it macroed too but its not consistent. Where other interrupts will also interrupt you to go off instantly the macro has to wait for whatever gcd is rolling to finish too shapeshift then do the no gcd skullbash. I end up spamming the button to make sure it goes off instead of just tapping it once like any other interrupt.
I’d also take skullbash just not requiring shapeshift; headbutting someone to shut them up seems more like a warrior thing but i’d take it in resto.
Is there an official thread about this yet?
A glaring issue that I already have with the new class tree is that as a Boomy it now looks like Bash and Well-honed instincts (both extremely necessary talents in PVP) are now being gate kept behind a 2-point talent node(Instincts of the Claw - Shred, Brutal Slash, Swipe, Rake, Mangle, and Thrash damage increased by 5%/10%.) which are effectively dead talents for boomy.
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