Jun 102010
Well, I said I wouldn’t rehash my previous thoughts on the new talents…and I was wrong. :) I’ve seen some good writeups from other feral bloggers, and I’ve changed my mind on a few. I’ve linked the new talents to Wowhead, but they’re not in the database yet- check here for the text.
- Improved Feral Charge: Increases your melee haste by 15/30% after you use Feral Charge (Bear) for 8 seconds, and Ravage will temporarly not require stealth for 3/6 seconds after you use Feral Charge (Cat). Moderately useful for bears, mostly a PvP talent for cats. The extra damage after a charge for bears is very nice to avoid threat pulls; however, GC has previously commented that threat past the few seconds should not be a major issue, so I see this more as a 5-man talent. For cats, this is highly unlikely to be used in a PvE scenario, due to threat. Yes, you could theoretically go Prowl->Feral Charge->Stealthed Ravage->Savage Roar->TF->Unstealthed Ravage for some nice burst, but the mob will then eat your face. Some have speculated on EJ that you could Bear FC and then shift to Cat, keeping the damage buff; I think not only would that be a DPS loss, it’s a misreading of the tooltip.
- Fury Swipes: When you auto-attack while in Cat Form or Bear Form, you have a 4/8/12% chance to gain an extra auto-attack on the same target. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds. Poor for bears; meh for cats. At the moment, this talent is pretty underpowered, especially for bears. Cats have 60 auto-attacks per minute (before haste); this bumps that up to 64-65ish, which boosts our white damage by 6-8% or so, which increases our overall damage by 3-4%ish (much depends on how much more damage (proportionally) will come from our white damage in Cata; now, it’s only about 35%). Bears only get 24 auto-attacks a minute, though, so so you’re only looking at 2-3 extra attacks a minute for the 3 points, and white attacks have never hit that hard anyway. I’d like to see the 6s CD dropped some; I don’t expect it to be removed entirely due to PvP burst complaints (OMG ferals have windfury QQ), but 3s would be a little better.
- Predatory Strikes (redesigned): Increases the critical strike chance of your Ravage by 25/50% at or above 90% health, and your finishing moves have a 10/20% chance per combo point to make your next Nature spell with a base casting time less than 10 seconds become an instant cast spell. PvP talent. See the Imp. FC discussion above.
- Endless Carnage: Increases the duration of your Rake by 3/6 seconds and your Savage Roar and Pulverize by 3/6 seconds. Exceptionally powerful talent for bears and cats. A 66% increase in Rake’s duration is VERY strong. Rake was already one of our strongest abilities by DPE but was hard to consistently keep up with the 9s duration, since it was prioritized behind Rip/Savage Roar/Glyph of Shred shreds. The duration increase to SR is nothing to sneeze at, either, and will make low-cp SR’s less painful. For bears, longer Pulverize duration means that you should be able to keep Pulverize up nearly 100% (depending on rage) which means more threat and (more importantly) more Savage Defense.
- Primal Madness: Tiger’s Fury and Berserk also increases your maximum energy by 6/12 during its duration, and your Enrage and Berserk abilities instantly generates 0/12 Rage. Situational for bears; poor for cats. Unless something changes dramatically, a good feral DPS never energy caps, so bumping our cap up temporarily doesn’t do anything for us and actually encourages bad habits. Bear-wise, more rage is nice, but it’s stuck behind KOTJ, which isn’t really a great bear talent either. I speculate that they plan to permanently drop the armor debuff from Enrage, or at least make it less painful: why would they keep buffing it otherwise?
- Nom Nom Nom: When you Ferocious Bite a target at or below 25% health, you have a 50/100% chance to instantly refresh the duration of your Rip on the target. Very powerful for cats. First, is there anyone that doesn’t like the name? KEEP NNN BLIZZ! Second, this brings a welcome change to the kitty DPS rotation and brings us more in line with other melee DPS classes who have a stronger(“execute”) attack sub-25%. Anything else will have to wait for actual numbers, but it’s good to see FB being rehabilitated. This may finally make Feral Aggression worth taking for cats (but don’t count on it.)
- Pulverize: Requires Dire Bear Form. Deals 100% weapon damage plus additional 786 damage for each of your Lacerate applications on the target, and increases your melee critical strike chance by 2% for each Lacerate application consumed for 10 seconds. Very powerful for bears. This will drastically shake up the bear single-target rotation, which is good. Since FFF’s cooldown will be greatly reduced, I’d imagine its power will be drastically weakened, taking it out of the general bear rotation. I like the Pulverize-Savage Defense synergy.
Overall, I’m very excited with the direction in which Feral is going right now. Bring on Cata already! :)
didn’t blizz say haste is going to affect energy/rage regen?
seems like that could make energy-cap-boostage somewhat useful
“and increases your melee critical strike chance by 2% for each Lacerate application consumed for 10 seconds. ”
I’m not really sure I understand this part in the Pulverize tooltip.
Will Pulverize “consume/remove” all stacks of Lacerate on your target when used, or is it just bad sentence-building?
Imp ferral charge may not be great to open a fight but surely its great on movement intensive fights where you could FC back to the boss and open up with some huge numbers?
Maybe its a situational PvE talent and a great PvP talent! If only they applied it to shred where you didn’t have to be in front of the boss for 6 secs!
I think you’re missing some stuff with the Ravage potential. With the high movements on fights that they seem to be gearing up for, take Morrowgar for an example. Tiger’s Fury should already be up and running, so charge in on the spike and spam Ravage until the 6 seconds are up. This would work as well with Deathwhisper and her mana shield. (Just be sure to mangle and rip before you leave.) The mage on gunship battle. The slimes on Putricide. Burning Skelletons on Dreamwalker. (Or a couple other mobs for that matter.) The downside to the current ravage is you can’t have Savage Roar going first. This fixes that and gives you a ton of burst that isn’t on a Berserk 3 minute cooldown.
Now obviously, I don’t know what the new fights look like. And maybe it will only have minimal impact on a tank-n-spank scenario, but to me, this seems to make Kitties more flexible on movement fights where we can’t get all our DoTs rolling.
[...] Feral Builds for Cata and More on new talents from the Fluid [...]
@Waller- We’ll have to see, but with none of our attacks having any cooldown, faster energy regen shouldn’t cap us (of course, movement fights are a huge variable)
@Golle- Yep, it’s constructed poorly, but that’s how I read it, it consumes Lacerate stacks. Otherwise, you could just spam it.
@Rahl/FI- Good points, and yeah, I can see some situational usage on things like Bone Spikes, but don’t forget this critical line from the Shred tooltip: “Effects which increase Bleed damage also increase Shred damage.” With Mangle and a bleed up, Shred will probably hit harder then Ravage, and for less energy.
Actually, I ran the numbers on them in another discussion about this:
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Using the talents in the Cata tree it does have more DPE than a talented shred. Both of these numbers are from the highest level currently available and ignoring crit. (Just because I don’t feel like the complexity right now and Ravage comes out better on crit with talents in the Cata tree.)
Shred:
2.25(damage) + 666 per 60 energy.
With Shredding attacks:
2.25(damage) + 666 per 50 energy.
With Rend & Tear:
2.7(damage) + 799.2 per 50 energy.
Savage Roar Glyphed:
3.591(damage) + 1062.936
Dividing out on a per energy basis:
.072(damage) + 21.259 per energy.
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Ravage:
3.85(damage) + 1771 per 60 energy.
Savage Roar Glyphed:
5.121(damage) + 2355.43 per 60 energy.
Dividing out on a per energy basis:
.085(damage) + 39.257 per energy.
—
Comparison
.072(damage) + 21.259 per energy for Shred.
.085(damage) + 39.257 per energy for Ravage.
Add in the fact that Ravage will have a higher chance to crit than Shred and more likely to benefit from the bonus damage associate with that and it is a win. The low DPE currently comes from the fact that you can not have Savage Fury going in most current scenarios before you ravage.
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Now you’re more the theorycrafter than I am. Did I miss something in my math?
Naw, I’m not more of a theorycrafter, I just play one on the internet. :)
You’re forgetting that the Mangle debuff (+30% damage to bleeds) applies to Shreds as well. Ultimately, though, this is somewhat academic, as they will definitely be adjusting coefficients. I have (tentatively) heard that Ravage’s coefficient will be bumped to 550%, which WILL make it stronger, actually, unless Shred’s coefficient changes as well.
Also, don’t forget the extra crit is only for targets over 90% HP. Great for bursting down small adds that don’t hit hard enough to be tanked (because you WILL pull threat with a 550% AP crit Ravage right off the bat) but not much else, PvE wise.
Oh… extra time to Rake & SR? Hawt!
(NOM NOM NOM!)
Nom Nom Nom: When you Ferocious Bite a target at or below 25% health, you have a 50/100% chance to instantly refresh the duration of your Rip on the target. Very powerful for cats. First, is there anyone that doesn’t like the name? KEEP NNN BLIZZ! Second, this brings a welcome change to the kitty DPS rotation and brings us more in line with other melee DPS classes who have a stronger(“execute”) attack sub-25%. Anything else will have to wait for actual numbers, but it’s good to see FB being rehabilitated. This may finally make Feral Aggression worth taking for cats (but don’t count on it.)
Dont like this at all….
NomNomNom should give us 33% more bleed damage as a cat and 33% more dodge as a bear against targets under 25%.
[...] My belief (don't want to cross the alpha wall here) is that they are planning on increasing Ravage's coefficient. At some point, however, I'd imagine you'd run into threat problems. That's what'll kill it for PvE, with the exception of things that aren't tanked (think Bone Spikes). Unless I'm misreading Primal Madness, it looks pretty useless for (good) cats, since we're not energy-capping to begin with. (more analysis on my blog here) [...]