Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Wrath Watch: Cat Form Abilities (Part I)

Many druid abilities are taking a beating on the Official Blizzard Druid Forums, since Eyonix asked for feedback from each class a few days ago.

The majority of players are commenting on Feral and Restoration abilities,while the Balance tree is receiving less criticism (except for the overall functionality of ToL, which shouldn't be minimized).

A few Cat Form abilities are in the firing line of many comments, and rightfully so:

Tiger's Fury- 40 DPS, but only for 6 second, while costing 30 valuable Energy. It is marginally useful for grinding elementals or other bleed-immune targets. I agree with most posts asking to lengthen the duration of this ability and the damage output.

Ferocious Bite- FB is inferior to Rip and Shred and is largely used for bleed-immune targets and may be worth keeping for that reason. After all, we need to grind elementals and there may be a fair amount of Undead that will need re-killing in Northrend. The main complaint about FB is that this ability does not scale with gear. Adding more damage based on Strength or Agility would be great so that FB becomes more powerful with better gear. Decreasing the time it takes to acquire the 100 energy to make good use of the 5 combo points for this ability by adding an Energy generating talent for Cats would also help make FB a more powerful talent.

Feral Faerie Fire- is great against clothies and leathers and prevents stealth in PvP, but seriously, why not put Improved Faerie Fire in the Feral tree? We could trade it for Nurturing Instinct?

And most importantly: Cat Form- please give Cats a new look! Snow Leopard?

In addition to concerns about talent and abilities that don't stack with gear, there are the age-old "poor itemization of high-end leather" comments. This may be true, but I'll be lucky to get through all of Karazahn before the expansion- this is an issue for the high-end raiders.

As for my predictions:
1) Tiger's Fury will be buffed.
2) Ferocious Bite will be made to scale with gear.
3) Improved Faerie Fire will likely remain a Balance talent.
4) I am praying that we get a new form.

Next time on Wrath Watch: Bear Form Abilities.

Ritual of the Beast

3 comments:

kane said...

TF?FB?
I dont have these abilities on my feral bar since I get level 70.

FF?
perfect pull machine if you have rage in bear form and you want to keep it for next fight.

I would like to see new TF as a party buff.. some kind of Bloodlust for ferals.

But to be honest I would like to see a new version of textures or even models on druid forms.
On every single movie I can see how good a warrior is.. I can see a sword from SSC, tier 6, top level enchants.. and druids?
damn!
there is no difference between druid form late BRD and Conqueror of Black Temple!
they just look the same.

many months ago I saw an idea how to improve druid life.. you could 'learn' 'aspect of Polar Bear' and you would get a white bear skin, then you could 'learn' a aspect of 'alpha wolf' and you would get a new skin again..

first.. Im sure that this match perfect for druids nature..
second.. this could be an easy way to implement new passive skills, like feral tanks will choose a 'polar bear' aspect for Hydross fight to get +20% frost ress..
typical BG ferals will go for 'shadowprowler' aspect to get 'increase stealth' when raid DPSers could try to learn 'alpha wolf' with 'some-kind-of-mighty-howl' as a party DPS buff.

of course you could have only one aspect for form/character, and to get a new one you should do some meditation/quest/something to avoid picking different aspects before every single fight.

I just created a new alt... mage.. and I choose a tailoring not for creating a super powerful robes... but for searching a most beautiful combination for my silly blood elf.
because for the first time I can choose how my character looks.

Anonymous said...

Michal,

I couldn't agree more about changing druid color/texture to represent quality of gear, but an entire new form is where the money is at.

Similar to hunters, certain forms would take a certain level to obtain/learn. We could perhaps combine the Restoration/Balance trees, as Dire Bear and Cat are combined now, and have a whole new Master of Nature tree that basically work along the lines of Beastmaster, except druids are the beasts.

A similar idea to your own has actually received some publicity in forums and is being called Ritual of the Beast. I've included the link above in the body of the post.

Thanks for checking out the blog.

Anonymous said...

I loved Phaelia's take on druid forms in her Resto4Life blog [ http://www.resto4life.com/index.php/2007/12/11/too-sexy-for-my-bark/ ], especially the #2 option of adding more "bling" to the models depending on player stats and iLevel of their gear.