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Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we reach 80. It is not the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Hail, druids. This week, we're finishing our leveling guide, and after that we're going to be addressing any subject as long as it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with leveling. I'll be revisiting this guide as Cataclysm approaches, as we've already been told that spell and ability ranks are going the way of the dodo, which was really the only depressing announcement from BlizzCon as I was in the middle of formatting and linking hundreds of same.
To wrap up the full guide:
LEVEL 71
Nothing new (awesomeness aside, Swift Flight Form is just a kicked-up version of Flight Form, strictly speaking -- although I can already hear the howls of indignation erupting over this statement from druid herbalists and skinners), but between 71 and 80 your friendly local Druid trainer is going to soak you for massive amounts of gold. Keep questing.
- Swift Flight Form: You can train the 280% bonus speed flight form (or 310% bonus, if you manage to add a super-fast flying mount to your stable) at 71 if you didn't do the questline at 70. To be frank, most new druids will reach 71 a lot faster than they're likely to get a group for heroic Sethekk Halls these days, so I have resigned myself to the quite-likely possibility that the wonderfully-designed and hugely engaging epic flight form quest will remain undone by many players. Readers have doubtless noticed that swift flight form is without question my favorite photographic subject ingame, and that's because: a). It's almost impossible to take a bad picture with them, and: b). The form is thoroughly iconic to the class. As you've already noticed from the use of Flight Form, you're able to skin and pick herbs in form, making the druid a superlative farmer for these professions. You'll also be a few steps ahead of anyone else in your party no matter where you're going. Insta-cast? Yes please.
- Demoralizing Roar, rank 7: standard upgrade.
- Regrowth, rank 11: standard upgrade.
- Rip, rank 8: standard upgrade.
- Tiger's Fury, rank 5: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 72
Rollin', rollin', rollin'...
LEVEL 73
- Claw, rank 7: standard upgrade. As always, there is no reason to have this on your bars if you're feral.
- Lacerate, rank 2: standard upgrade.
- Maul, rank 9: standard upgrade.
- Ravage, rank 6: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 74
- Healing Touch, rank 14: standard upgrade. I've had a few people ask whether Healing Touch plays a prominent role in a restoration druid's playstyle, and the answer is generally not. If you're running a dual-spec resto build while leveling (or masochistically healing your way to the level cap), you can glyph Healing Touch to have access to a makeshift flash heal before Nourish (at 80), but that's about it. A resto druid should of course have the usual Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch macro for an insta-cast version of the spell when burst healing is needed, and that's where HT finds its most frequent use. We're not designed around spamming direct-healing spells; even Nourish is typically used in conjunction with HoT's on a target unless you're just spot-healing a raid. Don't feel guilty if you feel like you should be using it but everything else just works better. While the Dreamstate build has famously made use of Healing Touch spam, Dreamstate was really only a viable build in early Burning Crusade (and perhaps early Wrath, where a weak Nourish just wasn't that great versus a glyphed Healing Touch) and has always scaled worse than its full-resto or heavy-resto counterparts. One of my druid colleagues, a multi-season Gladiator, once referred to aBC-era Dreamstate druid as "a paladin with a permanent Curse of Tongues," and I don't think I can describe it any better than that. More on this in a bit as we reach 80 and Nourish.
- Maim, rank 2: standard upgrade.
- Thorns, rank 8: standard upgrade.
- Wrath, rank 11: standard upgrade.
- Savage Roar: This ability, in a nutshell, is what makes competitive cat DPS possible. Roughly analogous to the rogue's Slice and Dice, Savage Roar is a finishing move that increases your physical damage done by 30% for 14 to 34 seconds, depending on how many combo points you've got on your target. A serious cat will additionally want Glyph of Savage Roar. How soon should you get it up? As soon as you can -- the number of combo points doesn't matter unless you're DPSing trash (in which case a 1 or 2-CP Savage Roar will reap more immediate benefits than a 5-CP Savage Roar). When should you let it drop? Pretty much never. Any experienced combat rogue will tell you that allowing SnD to drop is a huge DPS loss, and the same is true of Savage Roar. If you're just starting a fight, SR should be the first finishing move to go up, and after that, just don't let it drop; the temporary DPS you'd gain from using a Ferocious Bite or anotherRip will almost never offset the damage you're losing from SR dropping unless the mob's within a hairsbreadth of dying anyway. Should you use it while you're out grinding? Things will certainly die faster if you do, but in decent gear versus an average Northrend mob of 8,000-14,000 health, a cat will kill it within a few seconds regardless.
- Moonfire, rank 13: standard upgrade.
- Rejuvenation, rank 14: standard upgrade.
- Shred, rank 8: standard upgrade.
- Tranquility, rank 6: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 76
Curiously enough, only one skill to train at level 76, and not a very good one at that:
Cower, rank 6: standard upgrade. This is the max-rank form of Cower and will shave something in the region of 1100 threat off your total. Can you find use for it? Sure. Enough to merit keeping it on your bars? Probably not.
LEVEL 77
If your druid isn't fortunate enough to have been flying in Northrend this whole time thanks to the BoA Tome of Cold Weather Flight, hit a trainer and train it up. 1,000g here, 1,000g there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
LEVEL 78
Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we gain all of the abilities that went live during Burning Crusade and wonder why the hell Lacerate can't be trained earlier than level 66, because the Bear spends 16 levels Mangling things it can't actually put a bleed on. Weird.
Only one more leveling guide after this, and then we'll be heading into an array of new articles I've been planning for a while, and a Druid perspective on tanking issues raised by Matt Rossi's article. I will probably be turning some of this material into just plain Druid posts rather than Shifting Perspectives columns, though, as otherwise it'll take longer than I'd like to get them all posted.
LEVEL 61
In Outland and Northrend, you'll be training new ranks each level as opposed to every other level, so don't forget to hit your trainer promptly with each level-up.
- Shred, rank 6: standard upgrade.
- Wrath, rank 9: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 62
Cat form gets a non-stealth stun approximately a billion years after its Rogue counterparts, but that's it for the new stuff.
- Maim: An unholy mating of the Rogue abilities Eviscerate and Kidney Shot, Maim is Cat form's only interrupt (unless you count Pouncing a mob or player whose attention is directed elsewhere) and is a Stun effect as of patch 3.1, as opposed to the Incapacitate it was previously. What's the difference? Incapacitate effects can be broken by damage, while stuns can't be. While this sounds like a good deal for Druid PvP, it also means that the Maim stun shares diminishing returns with Pounce and Bash. Don't forget that Maim is a baseline ability and you can use it on a mob/player even if you're not Feral. Building combo points on an enemy player to Maim them at a later point is a classic technique of Resto PvP (though considerably more common in BC arena than it is nowadays). Maim also comes in handy versus PvE mobs; if you're fighting a caster or healer, you've got a double interest in opening from Pounce, because in decent gear it's possible to take a mob from 100% to 0% without allowing it to get a cast off. What are your odds of doing this versus a player? Not all that terribly high.
Even if you switch to Bear in order to get Bash off, a Druid's ability to "stunlock" is considerably less than that of a Rogue's even if you've talented intoBrutal Impact, but the damage that Maim applies is also useful (particularly combined with Pounce's DoT and Rake) in draining their health. While out grinding, Maim can and should be used defensively to stun an enemy or mob if you're low on health and need to pop out and heal -- or if you need to make a break for it and get a head start.
- Demoralizing Roar, rank 6: standard upgrade.
- Healing Touch, rank 12: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 63
Rollin', rollin', rollin', keep that Lifebloom rollin', you don't have Lifebloom just yet, Raw-HIDE.
LEVEL 64
The much-beloved (and much-nerfed) Lifebloom makes its debut!
- Lifebloom: Lifebloom is one of those abilities that seems doomed to a life of endless tinkering, as we've previously observed. During BC, the spell was significantly cheaper than it is nowadays (and also wasn't possible to extend beyond a 6-second duration), to the point where Trees who were healing multi-tank fights were little other than glorified Lifebloom-bots. In Wrath -- at least at the present time -- it's a very mana-intensive (and usually ill-advised) proposition to roll Lifebloom on more than one tank at a time. Lifebloom adds another insta-HoT to our healing arsenal, but it requires a little more thought and attention than Rejuvenation or the talented Wild Growth. For PvE raiding, it still finds its best use being stacked and "rolled" (i.e. not allowed to reach its final heal, or "bloom") on a tank unless you deliberately allow it to bloom to deal with sudden burst; in 5-mans, you can still stack it if needed but can a little more liberal with the bloom due its mana return; in PvP, Lifebloom is one of our more annoying abilities versus an enemy due to its forced bloom upon dispel (screw 'em, if they didn't want it to heal than they shouldn't have tried to dispel it in the first place). As an interesting note, the threat generated by Lifebloom will belong to you during the rolling portion, but the threat of the final heal belongs to the person to whom it's applied. If you're a dedicated tank healer, you will want to pick up both Glyph of Lifebloom and the Balance talent Nature's Splendor (although it bears mentioning that any kind of Tree will want Nature's Splendor). It can be difficult for new Druids to keep track of the HoT's they have on targets; Tree Bark Jacket (which has recently moved; this is the old site) had an excellent post back in January on modifying Grid for this purpose that you'll want to read.
- Rake, rank 5: standard upgrade.
- Swipe (Bear), rank 6: standard upgrade.
- Thorns, rank 7: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 65
Bears can start mumbling to themselves, "One more level to Lacerate...one more level to Lacerate..."
- Dash, rank 3: standard upgrade.
- Regrowth, rank 10: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 66
Another way to bleed things to death. Feral seems curiously focused on that sort of thing.
- Lacerate: Lacerate needs to be stacked to 5 in any high-threat rotation versus a boss mob. For 5-man and trash-tanking, odds are good the mob's not going to live long enough to justify spending much time stacking it (the individual application of Lacerate does less threat than Swipe, and that's your primary concern while holding aggro against your LOLDPS), but it's still in your best interest to get at least one Lacerate going on as many mobs as you can. Why? Two reasons: a). Rend and Tear (you do have Rend and Tear, don't you?) and b). Primal Gore (you do have Primal Gore, don't you?). Rend and Tear is a significant contribution to Maul's threat, and the only way to get a mob bleeding as a Bear is to apply Lacerate (Mangle applies a debuff increasing bleed damage, but it doesn't actually cause a bleed in itself). If you're tanking, you want Lacerate up on your primary target at all times, and if you have Glyph of Maul (which you generally should in a dedicated Bear build), you also want it up on whatever secondary target the additional Maul is hitting. Also, because Savage Defense DOES proc from the Lacerate bleed crits granted by Primal Gore (and because Lacerate's threat is significantly better with the talent), you want to get Lacerate going early, triggering an SD proc and threat boost with each crit.
- Pounce, rank 4: standard upgrade.
- Ravage, rank 5: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 67
- Claw, rank 6: standard upgrade. Redundant skill is redundant.
- Maul, rank 8: standard upgrade.
- Rip, rank 7: standard upgrade.
- Starfire, rank 8: standard upgrade.
LEVEL 68
Get thee to Northrend, yongge wastrel, the lande of ices ynd snoo ynd very broun-colorred gears.
LEVEL 69
LEVEL 70
Ah, 70...I miss you somewhat. Or maybe I just miss the days when people were actually putting Nightmare Seeds up on the auction house. Farming those things is a pain.
- Cyclone: Oy. Possibly the second most-hated ability in BC PvP (the first would have been Fear), Cyclone is a short-lived but often ass-saving Banish effect that renders its target unable to do anything but float in midair mentally composing another apoplectic forum thread on the need to nerf Cyclone. The short duration makes it mostly useful as an escape mechanism in PvE and as the Druid's only baseline interrupt in caster form, but it's really in PvP that it, er, shines. I've embedded an early video from arena's Season 1 by a well-known EU Balance player named Tradix to demonstrate how Cyclone can be used both offensively and defensively. One of the things you'll also notice is that Tradix makes additional use of Cyclone by frequently timing Starfire casts (ordinarily difficult to get off in PvP) to land immediately after Cyclone breaks, providing a good source of burst on a target that can't avoid it.
- Gift of the Wild, rank 3: standard upgrade, but don't forget to pick up some Wild Quillvine.
- Hurricane, rank 4: standard upgrade.
- Mark of the Wild, rank 8: standard upgrade.
- Moonfire, rank 12: standard upgrade.
- Shred, rank 7: standard upgrade.
- Soothe Animal, rank 4: standard upgrade.
- Tranquility, rank 5: standard upgrade.
Ferocious Bite, rank 7: standard upgrade.
