TL;DR- Druid tips please

So, very seasoned player who usually hovered around the Warrior, Monk, and DK… Im going to use TWW (and its alt-friendliness) to make an effort to play more classes, and i’m really liking the Druid lately. Notably feral and guardian. I havent touched Balance yet, but i did dabble with catweaving resto at the end of Dragonflight…

So really, im just looking for any tips that the guides aren’t too clear on…
Why dont we take the double-rake talent? i feel it would be a no-brainer for cleave/aoe content. Or is Rake by itself just not strong enough to value using it that much over the other AOEs…

Why dont we take the incarnation talent instead of running the inferior version of Berserk and the 2M cooldown version of Convoke? Wouldnt the longer cooldown damage window overall be better than gambling on the convoke?

When using Incarnation as a bear; whats the priority for rage spending?.. just depends on the encounter?

thats all I could think on the spot; but thanks in advance. I’ve been running them both as druid of the claw, mostly because the “lazer bear” doesnt interest me much, and i just havent messed with Wildstalker yet.

Eh, wrong forum section, lol, but I think I can answer this (seeing as how I play Guardian/feral frequently)

I mean you can take it, it’s decent. It’s not that it’s not good, it’s just that there are better talents to take, IMO. Also, the double rake is geared more towards cleave content. We aren’t really hurting for aoe damage with Primal Wrath and all the other aoe talents we have, however, I could defintiely see a use for it on a council-style fight (Silken Court comes to mind).

P.S. Just did a quick check on warcraft logs and on heroic, the top 100 Feral druids take double rake 44% of the time on that fight, so yea it definitely sees some use.

Eh, with the energy changes Incarnation isn’t really that great. During much of the cd you are starved for energy anyways. Meanwhile, you can take Convoke and get the weaker berserk to use alongside it. They probably would have to buff energy regen or damage substantially to make Incarnation worth taking. That being said, I havn’t tested Incarnation in a while, so I would definitely recommend testing it out on a target dummy and seeing how it performs. Guides are good to use, but they aren’t the end-all-be-all.

This is going to depend on how much damage you are taking and the target cap. Things like Thrash is great, because it is not target capped. Raze is also really great, and is basically a AOE maul that you are going to want to use if you are looking good on hp/ironfur stacks and you want to put out some extra damage. Other than that it is basically Mangle/Swipe.