Thursday, February 21, 2008

Cats find a new role in patch 2.4

So, Cat Form and Bear Form are getting a little bit-o-first-aid injected into the feral talent tree. I beleive this is an attempt to allow those druids who are feral spec to offer more off-heals in PvE and better healing in PvP. Let me be clear, this is not a Resto build, but certainly adds some function to what was previously a very bad talent in the feral tree.

Wait, maybe it is still bad..... Ya, still bad. My druid in Tank gear and has 250 agility, unbuffed. My cat dps gear has 409 agility and 2431 attack power. My Cat gear is Kara-ok, while I have been primary Tank in Kara. With this level of gear, I would receive about 125 to 409 +Heal per spell cast in caster form and +486 healing received in cat form.

Not very much utility in a raid situation, as cats shouldn't be drawing aggro so frequently as to require intense healing, but for some extra off-heal potential I suppose this change is an improvement. As for a strategy of taking the two points with the plan to switch your Dire Bear to Cat form to receive the extra healing.... that doesn't sound like a very good idea. I don't like being without my 500% armor when I'm number one on the threat list.

In PvP this will help make a feral spec druid become a bit more difficult to kill, but the time it takes for us to get our good healing spells cast is a bit prohibitive for a major effect.

At least the talent is in-line with the new stat priorities for druids: Agi is better for DPS and AP is available in abundance on nice druid sticks.

In summary, I think PvP druids could enjoy this change, though I really don't see it being more effect than the traditional Feral builds, which almost never include Nurturing Instinct.

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