Previously I said “Yay! Levelling + Awesome skills!”… But that takes away the epicness of dinging 60 and getting HotR. Oh the days. Oh well.

I think it’s a nice change. I doubt I’ll level a rogue/hunter/etc past 10, maybe 15, after I exhaust RFC. Too boring. But this!?

Yeah, I might just stick around…

…last I saw, there was no more Improved Leader of the Pack.

I’d like to think that this is just an oversight, that it’ll be back in a later version of the beta and be in there in the final build of Cataclysm, but I realise probably not. Given Blizz’s stated intention of making healing harder and more challenging and more interesting, you can see why they would get rid of ILotP. If everyone’s getting 5% of their health back every 6 seconds or so, then that’s going to make things far too easy on the healer.

Except, I rely on ILotP a lot when I’m out and about and soloing. The ability of feral druids to solo things that usually need small groups is one of the biggest reasons I found myself liking feral druids so much. OMG nerfs whine whine whine QQ QQ QQ etc.

Oh well, I liked feral druids even before ILotP was in the game, I’m sure I’ll still like them once ILotP is taken out.

Point I want to make is Why is Furor in the Resto tree? It benefits Boomies and Ferals so really has no place whatsoever in the Resto tree. I would have thought this review would have been a good time to move it where it is relevant … or add something to it for our Tree brethren.

Here’s a spec build as an example.

As a basic premise, any DPS class is going to want to take any talent that will increase their DPS. Any choices that they have to make between two DPS talents is irrelevant, they’d likely take them both if they have spare talent points. What is done in this tree then has created mostly talents that you are going to take to increase your DPS, but you need to make choices that will affect how you act along the way.

In order to get to the third tier, you will need to invest 1 TP in either Improved Recuperate (health regen through CP use), Imp slice and dice (longer duration to a staple rogue finishing move), Imp Sprint (chance to remove movement impairing effects when sprint is used, helpful in PvP?), or Imp Kick (add a silence component to spell interrupts, PvP or PvP uses here).

You again have to spend 1 TP on utility to get to tier 4, and 2 TP to get to tier 5. Along the way, you’ve added Imp Gouge (lengthen a stun/disorient affect) and Reinforced leather (more damage mitigation through increased armor) as options for spending those points on utility.

Finally, you get to choose more utility through 4 TP that would be required to get you up to Killing Spree at the 31pt talent.

So overall, you have 8 of your 31 talent points that you can use to change the utility that you have while you are killing raid bosses. Maybe I need to be able to soak up more damage or do a bit more self healing in a particular raid, so i spend points in Imp Recuperate and Reinforced leather, along with some in Throwing spec to give FoK an interrupt for when i PvP.

If there’s one drawback with this tree, I think that it is slightly too much choice, i think you could put in a talent in tier 4 or 5 that is a DPS talent, and then have maybe 5 or 6 utility choices)

Anyhow, I don’t know much about many of the other trees, but I think it’s fairly clear with the combat tree the design strategy of this revamp.

I poked around at the trees earlier today and it looks like a kitty build won’t be too hard to do but with all the bear-specific talents in the feral tree coming up with a viable cat/bear build that can do both dps and tanking with one spec is going to be impossible. (Unless you can just drop all the feral-beneficial talents from resto but I didn’t look at those too closely yet.) I think kitty with some of the bear survival should be good enough to be an emergency offtank will work. High-end cat dps with a full tanking spec seems unlikely, though.

I’ve been planning on leveling a balance druid from 1->85 in Cataclysm but this almost makes me want to roll a 3rd druid to level a new feral druid from scratch to see what it’s like. Mangle at 10 makes sense in that it’s a very core ability of high-level ferals and new kittens and cubs should learn to use it early on.

Rauxis, chosen of CAT