"Your leader of the Pack ability also causes affected targets to heal themselves for 2%/4% of their total health when they critically hit with a melee or ranged attack. The healing effect cannot occur more than once every 6 sec. In addition, you gain 4%/8% of your maximum mana when you benefit from this heal."


See the part in bold. Note that the wording implies only the feral druid will receive the mana.

So basically this means feral druids are going to be a lot less likely to run out of mana..

This change is interesting because it makes LotP a lot more desireable for feral druids in Arena. Previously on long fights some druids ran out of mana, but with this new talent it appears that may no longer be the case.

Anyway, yea... thoughts? :>


[edit - also I just remembered, do any of you guys know if LotP is still confined to your party, or will it now affect the entire raid?[/edit]


-Annikk

LotP affects the entire raid. There was a recent blue post about the poor wording in the tooltip. But it does show-up as a raid buff. I was on the PTR the other night in a BG. I had a bazillion buffs the entire time I was in there. It was crazy.

8% of mana pool every 10ish seconds isn't going to solve feral mana issues. That's a "whopping" 480 mana with our level 80 mana pool of 6k. So, we need 3 OoC procs to equal the cost of shifting to cat/bear 1 time.

How many times do you shift in 30 seconds of fighting a mage? This gives us one extra shift before we run out of mana, assuming you can get in melee range and proc OoC 3 times in that 30 secs. Unless they drastically change the mana costs of shifting or put a bunch of int on the feral pvp gear, ferals should handily retain our title of the most useless class in arenas.

I'm not sure what you mean with all the reference to OOC - you get the 8% mana (which I'm presuming is 480 as you say) every time you get a heal from the LotP aura - which is basically every 6-7 sec for any druid with decent crit chance. Three procs would be enough for a shift, so that's like ~20 sec spent in a form.. sounds a pretty reasonable deal to me..?


-Annikk

I'm pretty sure the Imp LotP will help some with the feral mana issues but yeah, in PvP it still seems that if they don't give us some int, we're definitely still suffering. Feral druids are not equal to rogues. I mean if they want us to play kitty like that but I think in lack of the control that a rogue brings, we bring versatility which comes with shifting. =/

It's definitely going to help but again, we're not just shifting in and out to break CC, I find myself off-healing a lot as well, casting cyclone, etc. I am holding off though until expansion gets released though to really make any decisions. I'm hoping it will turn out for the best. PvE ferals really don't need a huge mana pool but in PvP? I'm not sold yet.

You can always gem/enchant for int.

not for PvP... if you're gemming or enchanting for int, then you're headed for fail... the burst damage we can bring to the table can be pretty disgusting (in a good way for us)

crit rating, agi, AP, stam, and possibly strength for PvP'ers... unless im totally ignorant...

maybe Blizz will put a longer CD on blink so that right after a mage blinks, i can shift to bear, charge, and get my big claws all over their squishy hides... lol...

If you think you need int and blizzard didn't give it to you on your gear then you have to gem/enchant for it.

For PvE, Blizzard didn't give me enough sta or agi so I gem/enchant for it. How is gemming for +int on PvP any different?

dammit, tlbj... you're gonna make do some research, aren't you??? lol

seriously though... we rely on melee damage as ferals in PvP... if we sacrifice anything that affects how much damage we do, or what chance we have to deliver BIG damage for what? an extra shift or possibly a rejuv? that doesn't sound worthwhile... especially when it's really mages more than any other class that make us burn though mana for shapeshifting

I suck at PvP and am way too lazy to learn new tricks, so I focus strictly on melee damage. It is my understand that that "good" PvP Druids shift quite often, so if you need to shift to be "good", then I guess you need int to be good. Does it mater if that int comes form gear, gems, enchants, buffs or talents?

depends on the class we're fighting for how often we shift... Warriors, for example, are ezmode... ESPECIALLY if we start out stealthed in cat form... toss up mangle and a few bleeds, shift to bear, keep demo roar, FF, mangle, and bleeds on them until you're looking at a corpse :P

Our burst damage is not high enough to burn down and equally geared opponent in pvp generally, so we have to shift and cast to have a chance. Now if I understand correctly they have nerfed Mangle (Cat) and buffed Shred which will screw us even harder in pvp since 1v1 all we have is Mangle spam for melee damage. How often are you behind a pvp target long enough to spam Shred?

One thing we need to consider is that in LK your mana regen while in form is the same as while you are in caster form. This is a huge increase over the current mechanism in which feral form mana regen is significantly less than caster form regen.

That is true, looking forward to that. PvP balance in LK is still mostly a mystery, even to Blizzard. Ghostcrawler has posted several times about how hard it is to balance PvP and PvE simultaneously.

I hope feral becomes PvP competetive when it is all said and done. I think we do ok as a support class in BG's, but 1v1 and in arena we are really weak compared to either of our parent classes (rogues and warriors, I mean).

Come to think of it, I'd be willing to forego a decent sized mana pool in order be competetive in bear and cat in PvP. We already suffer from penalties other hybrids don't (the need to shift before we heal or cast a cc spell which forces a 1.5 second gcd before we can access any of our utility, for example). Maybe that was part of Blizzard's thought process.

One thing we need to consider is that in LK your mana regen while in form is the same as while you are in caster form. This is a huge increase over the current mechanism in which feral form mana regen is significantly less than caster form regen.

y understanding is that the current in-form regen is based off spirit alone - no contribution from mp5. Is that correct?

How are they changing it in WotLK?


-Annikk

How are they changing it in WotLK?I'm really not sure, all I've read is that it now the "same as caster form", but if that just includes MP5 it wouldn't mean much for Ferals. Though it would make intensity worth more....

It would make it a bit "fairer" to include mp5 in the feral regen calculations, although in reality as you say it wouldn't make much practical difference :p


-Annikk

We already suffer from penalties other hybrids don't (the need to shift before we heal or cast a cc spell which forces a 1.5 second gcd before we can access any of our utility, for example). Maybe that was part of Blizzard's thought process.

you don't auto-shift out of animal form when you start casting?

Of course, but I didn't think that allowed us to skip the gcd...doh. I stand corrected!

Gemming/enchanting for int will just gimp us further in PvP to be honest. If you ever do a lot of PvP hardcore, one of the main problems that feral druids have is our AP not scaling like the other classes. We can do very nice amounts of burst damage but overall, we lack a lot of things that make us really great.

Even enchanted for PvP and whatnot, it's hard for us to compete. Should we gem for int so that we can actually...use our non-form skills it'll just be further widdening the gap in our damage output. Gemming for int is sort of like the equivalent of skipping mangle or NS or something.

Honestly though, I'm going to save any real opinions regarding PvP viability for ferals until 80 but I'm really not holding my breath. Beserk's usefulness in PvP got nerfed into oblivion, though I think I did hear they finally changed it to not break with shifting, though someone confirming this would be great.