Patch 3.0.3 - Build 9095

The beta servers have gotten a new build.

Talent/Ability changes:
Balance
* Earth and Moon changed from 5 to 3 ranks and now increases spell damage taken by 4/9/13% for 12 seconds and increases your spell damage by 1/2/3%. (Old - Increased Arcane/Fire/Frost/Nature/Shadow damage by 3/5/8%)
* Eclipse now increases damage done by Wrath by 20% (up from 10%) and has a chance of increasing your critical strike chance with Starfire by 30%. (Up from 15%)
* Moonfury changed from 5 to 3 ranks. Now increases damage done by Starfire, Moonfire, and Wrath by 3/6/10%. (Old - 2/4/6/8/10%)

Feral
* Predatory Instincts doesn't work with Bear and Dire Bear form anymore.
* Growl cooldown has been changed to 8 seconds. (Down from 10 seconds)

Restoration
* Improved Tree of Life now increases your armor contribution from items by 33/66/100%. (Old - Increased your total armor)

As promised, balance got some bloat reduction, which makes creating a useful build much easier (e.g. 60/0/11)
Also, the changes to Eclipse make it even more interesting. Throwing in one or two Wraths every now and then to increase Starfire crit chance by 30% should make for an interesting rotation.
The change to bonus armor in ToL is a slight nerf, but brings it in line with the way it works for other forms.

The reduced Growl CD is something we wanted for a long time. It makes fights where you got to have several tanks taunting a bit easier to organize (although the last fight where the CD was a problem in that regard was in BWL). The Predatory Instincts change has been coming a long time. Actually I had the impression that this was already on live, and they only had to change the tooltip.

These changes have all been expected, no surprises there. But there are some changes to Glyphs.

* Glyph of Wrath - Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting your Wrath spell by 50%. (Old - Increases the chance you'll resist spell interruption when casting your Wrath spell by 50%.)
* Glyph of Innervate - Your Innervate spell now grants you full mana regeneration while casting for 20 sec, in addition to the effect on the primary target. Innervate's effect is instead increased by 20% if you are the primary target. (Old - Your innervate ability now has an additional 20% strength mana regeneration effect on you, in addition to the effect on your primary target.)
* Glyph of Starfire - Your Starfire ability increases the duration of your Moonfire effect on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds. (Old - Didn't have the 9 seconds limit)

The change to the Innervate Glyph is a nice buff which makes it a bit more advantageous to use it on others - although I am not sure whether that will happen often enough that it warrants using this Glyph. 90% of the time you use it on yourself, and an extra 20%... I don't know if that is good enough to pass on other, more important Glyphs.
The Glyph of Starfire got a pretty big nerf. Some have been excited about the old version of it, and now it got limited to 9 seconds extension. Still, together with Nature's Splendor it reduces your mana expenditure quite a bit.
The new Glyph of Wrath makes more sense - now you can only get pushed back by 0.25 seconds per hit (and only two times at that). Only half a second pushback no matter how often you get hit is pretty nice.


Not many changes, no big surprises.

From my side, there is a big theorycrafting post incoming. Should be done tomorrow or Monday.

All These Talents - So Few Points

Patch 3.0.2 is upon us. All talent points will be reset, so how to spend them, with all the new talents available to us?

So I took it upon myself to throw together some exemplary builds for level 70.


Restoration

14/0/47
As before I think it will be best to just skip the Healing Touch focused talents, in order to maximize our HoT potential. Also I went for the 11 point talent in the balance tree instead of going for Wild Growth. While being nice and something I'll definitely pick up when I am 80, right now it is not as strong as Nature's Splendor.

If you really want to have Wild Growth, try this build: 8/0/53


Balance

50/0/11
This build focuses on raid DPS. As you can see it doesn't take any of the new shiny tools - while they are nice, for most situations you just don't need them. It also includes Omen of Clarity, which now procs off spells as well.


Feral

0/50/11
This is a tanking build. Although Berserk would be nice, Omen of Clarity is more important for threat generation. The two points in Shredding Attacks and the three in Infected Wounds could be moved to other talents, if so preferred.

0/53/8
This is a PvP build. It doesn't take Omen of Clarity in favor of Berserk, as Omen of Clarity only procs of white damage and the burst factor Berserk gives you is more important in PvP. You could take three points out of the feral tree and put them in Nature's Focus, so that you get some interrupt protection on your heals and CCs.

0/50/11
This is a PvE DPS build. It goes for everything related to DPS as well as some utility. Should you have enough expertise and hit you could free two points from Primal Precision. Also you could take the 5 points from Feral Aggression and put them into Feral Instinct and/or Thick Hide.


These builds are no absolutes - I haven't done the theorycrafting on several abilities yet. Also, they are no builds for leveling to 80; they are for 70 endgame play.

Two Specs - Too Many Choices

At this weekend's Blizzcon it was once again announced that we will get a dual-spec feature.

We've heard about it before:
We most surely are working on some plans to allow players to switch between specs, but the details are sill being discussed internally.

Just wanted to add that it is most likely that we will see this added to the game in a patch after the release of WotLK :-)

Now we have gotten some extra details:
The dual-spec system will interface with the UI.
* Action bars will flip when you switch your spec so you don't have to re-do all your keys.
* It will likely also tie into Glyphs so you don't have to re-do Glyphs whenever you switch specs.

And:
The goal is to let you switch specs very easily in raid, even between fights ! However it won't be possible to switch specs in the middle of an arena match.

They have also stated that switching during combat will be prohibited as well. How they will deal with classes that can leave combat at will I do not know, but some sort of hidden debuff after leaving combat would come to mind - maybe something around one minute.


All this is pretty great, and definitely at the better end of what I was expecting. Judging from the "switch specs very easily in raid" I would assume that there will be no or only a short CD on the ability. If the CD were too long, one would be stuck with the wrong spec - which I would not fit the description IMO.


So with all this information at hand, we can start to think about which two specs we will be taking. Let's have a look at the options.

Balance
- PvE Raid
- PvE Solo/Farming
- PvP

Feral
- PvE Tank
- PvE DPS
- PvP

Resto
- PvE
- PvP

Hybrid
- PvP Feral/Resto (NS, or even Swiftmend)
- PvP Balance/Resto (fun things like Moonkin Form and Swiftmend at the same time)


And those are just what I came up from the top of my head. There are so many druid builds possible with 71 talents points, I couldn't list them all.


Basically I see two ways of using our new dual-spec goodness. First, taking two different trees, for example Feral and Resto. That way you can be Feral, but switch to Resto if your guild needs a healer. Or you can be Balance and switch to Feral in order to off-tank.
The second way would be to take two builds within the same tree. One for PvP, the other for PvE, or one for raids and the other for solo-play.


With Abies I will probably go for a combination of tanking and Feral PvP. A PvP build will still do decent cat DPS, and my role in raids will be the one of main tank anyways.
Nocturna will be some combination of full Resto and a Balance build - maybe a Balance/Resto hybrid. I don't PvP much with her (don't like caster PvP), which means I can focus on PvE builds.


What will you choose?

Big Druid Changes in Build 8885

The latest build brings a major rework of the balance tree and some changes in restoration and feral as well.

As there are now completely up-to-date talent builders yet, I will wait for a day until you see some posts about the new possibilities.

In short: Feral got two new talents and some others moved around, restoration got a small change to Furor and balance got a major overhaul, with some talents that are useful for healing moved upwards (resto builds will now want to put around 14 points in balance), and a lot of changes and new talents.

More tomorrow.