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Feral Druid Talent Choices

Rawr...meow..I'm the guy with the claws.

Note: Current for World of Warcraft v3.1

For me, the Talent choices for Feral Druids in The Burning Crusade were incredibly easy to make by simply prioritizing maximum Threat generation, damage output, and tank survivability.

With v3.0 of WoW (the mechanics for the debut of Wrath of the Lich King), came the notion of splitting out Druid Talents to force a specialization in Cat or Bear. Unfortunately, PvP is yet another aspect. This led to some significant bloat in the Talent trees.

With v3.1, the split became a little greater, but dual specs came out as well, dawning a day when a Druid could stop trying to make one build work and just have two separate, specialized builds. With that change, my focus has turned away from hybrid builds towards more specialized builds. The primary reason is that I expect the content to be designed around that capability, so there are no more good reasons not to have the best possible build for a given situation.

PvE Tank

Here's a link to the basic build. Focus on maximizing stats and overall survivability. You have 3 points left to spend as you see fit. The choices are explained in Evaluating Bear Talents. Some suggestions for the last 3 points:

• Thick Armor 3/3
• King of the Jungle 3/3 (my default choice)
• King of the Jungle 1/3 and max out Furor 5/5

Razor Kitty - Raid Cat Build

Raid Cat (Razor Kitty) - This build focuses on maximizing single target raid DPS, which consists of a lot of regular melee attacks and bleeds. For rationales on certain Talents, check out Evaluating Cat DPS Talents.

For greater versatility, you could drop some or all of your points in Feral Agression 5/5 and put them into Feral Instincts (FI) or Infected Wounds (IW). FI will increase your AoE damage, but I find that Swipe is already dangerous enough in terms of pulling aggro. IW will of course help insure that your kill target has a slowing effect on him. Since most Tanks should be providing that, it's usually not an issue. If you are asked to Tank with your Cat Spec, then these two Talens will dramatically increase your multi-mob Threat generation and survivability.

Feral PvE Hybrids

Hybridization, while less necessary than it used to be, is still a consideration, since we can only have two specs at a given time, and with four roles across PvE and PvP, Druids have eight potential specs.

• Bear Cat: Start with the base Bear build and add Predatory Instincts 3/3.
• Cat Bear: Start with the Raid Cat build, then take out as many points as you like from Feral Aggression 5/5 and Improved Mangle 3/3 to pick up Protector of the Pack 3/3, Infected Wounds, and Natural Reaction 3/3. If you are good at math, you realized that I gave you 8 points to buy 9 points worth of Talents. I would deprive Natural Reaction of 1 point unless you are certain that someone else will always provide a 20% attack slowing ability on your target.

PvP Cat Build - PvP

Here's a decent starting point. In the past, I tried 2/2 Improved Mark of the Wild, but have since rethought it. Having that full Energy bar when I pop out of Bear is too handy. Inspired by some highly-ranked Ferals, I have also pulled one point from Primal Precision to top off King of the Jungle.

Depending upon who you ask, the following Talents are ones among which you might slide points between, to suit your style, taste, team, etc. I have sorted them in order form most least likely to most likely to have points.

• Natural Shapeshifter - Some folks will put a point in here. Most won't
• Primal Precision - you are mostly going to benefit from not losing the Energy on a failed finishing move, but wheb Rogues and Cats, you might miss this Talent.
• King of the Jungle - stealing one point from here is not too deleterious and if you are not very precise, you may not enjoy the full benefit of 3 points here anyway.

Talent Evaluations

• Evaluating Cat DPS Talents
• Evaluating Bear Talents

Summary of Talent Utility by Role

And here's a cutesy chart summary of the detailed evaluations. The red shaded Talents are ones that I think are universally very good to have. There are way too many Talents that might be useful for PvP, so you will have to make a lot of tough choices, the first of which will probably be giving up some amount of DPS.

Talent	PvE Cat	PvP	Tank
F 1 - Ferocity 5
F 1 - Feral Aggression 5
F 2 - Feral Instinct 3
F 2 - Savage Fury 2
F 2 - Thick Hide 3
F 3 - Feral Swiftness 2
F 3 - Survival Instincts 1
F 3 - Sharpened Claws 3
F 4 - Shredding Attacks 2
F 4 - Predatory Strikes 3
F 4 - Primal Fury 2
F 4 - Primal Precision 2
F 5 - Brutal Impact 2
F 5 - Feral Charge 1
F 5 - Nurturing Instinct 2/2
F 6 - Natural Reaction 3
F 6 - Heart of the Wild 5
F 6 - Survival of the Fittest 3
F 7 - Leader of the Pack 1
F 7 - Improved Leader of the Pack 2
F 7 - Primal Tenacity 3
F 8 - Protector of the Pack 3
F 8 - Predatory Instincts 5
F 8 - Infected Wounds 3
F 9 - King of the Jungle 3
F 9 - Mangle 1
F 9 - Improved Mangle 2
F 10 - Rend & Tear 5*
F 10 - Primal Gore 1
F 11 - Berserk 1
R1 - Improved Mark of the Wild 2
R1 - Nature's Focus 3
R1 - Furor 3/5 (PvE) or 5/5 (PvP)
R2 - Naturalist 5
R2 - Subtlety 3
R2 - Natural Shapeshifter 3
R3 - Omen of Clarity 1
R3 - Master Shapeshifter 2

* - I feel that Primal Gore should be a given, so you need Rend & Tear 5.