I thought I made make a small post about my feral druid’s talents, both normal and PvP, and explain why I’ve taken them and what other builds I would consider/change to based on the situations I may encounter during my games in the arena.

Normal talents

Let’s first start with my normal talents. Starting from the top (Level 15) all the way down to the bottom (Level 100)

Tier 1 – Level 15:

Sabertooth:

A 20% damage increase from a finishing move ability is a great increase, along with the mastery not only including bleed damage but also finishing move abilities damage as well, such as ferocious bite this gives it very good value, then increasing the duration of your Rip makes it a very strong talent to go for. Feral druids also have something called snapshotting, which I’ll cover in my Tier 7 – Level 100 talent. If you can’t wait to find out what I mean then follow the link attached.

Tier 2 – Level 30:

Wild Charge:

I never replace this ability, the mobility it brings to your feral is amazing. Let me give you a couple of situations this ability can be utilised. You’re playing against a hunter and you have a healer on your team. The hunter is heading to your healer to trap him, you can wild charge back to your healer and eat the trap for him, this helps him to hold his trinket for longer, for a more dire situation.

Another situation: You’re against a warrior and he’s kiting you because he’s low. You can switch to bear form, charge him, and basically root him to the spot, allowing you to shift back into cat form and add some extra damage, and hopefully some bleeds to the warrior in attempts to get that killing blow.

Tier 3 – Level 45:

Restoration Affinity:

This ability is usually my go-to, unless I know I am going to be trained to the ground by a melee cleave or something then I always take restoration affinity, if I know I am getting trained I will take Guardian Affinity for the extra damage reduction and extra heals in bear form.

Restoration Affinity is great to help heal teammates and yourself and hopefully do enough to keep you in the game trying to turn the tide of the game and get a win.

Tier 4 – Level 60:

Mighty Bash:

This is a great stun to use offensively or defensively off CD (cooldown). You can bash a healer into a clone for CC, you can bash on heals for a killing blow, you can bash dps LoSing (line of sighting) their healer to try and land a kill, you can use it as a “kick” to stop a chaos bolt being cast, it’s uses are almost only limited to what creative ways you can decide to use it. Want to stun the rogue to clone the healer to train the mage? Go for it. Want to stun the healer as he’s 20% hp and you want to land the kill? Go for it. It has so many uses it would be foolish to not give this talent a go.

Tier 5 – Level 75:

Soul of the Forest:

Soul of the Forest is a nice talent to take, as a feral the main problem we can come across is low to no energy for abilities. It regenerates fast enough, but the game play can and does usually feel smoother with Soul of the forest, if you’re low energy and you do a full 5 point rip, you regenerate 25 energy, and the rip will do 5% increased damage. Again, snapshotting can be helpful here, I’ll still cover this a little further on in the post.

Incarnation is another good option, but I prefer the consistency with the Soul of the Forest, not just taking a CD to pop. Berserk for me does enough, the only thing Incarnation adds is one stealth during the burst and the rake and shreds are as if you’re still in stealth. It’s a good option to take but I just prefer Soul of the Forest currently.

Tier 6 – Level 90:

Brutal Slash:

Brutal slash is a pretty strong ability with a low energy requirement making it a good ability to use when the enemy team turtle behind a pillar to try and recover, not only does it have a lower energy cost but it’s also stronger than swipe through damage output. Swipe does however deal 20% more damage to bleeding targets and to my knowledge Brutal Slash doesn’t. Although you just have to remember you only have 3 charges of it, each charge is on an 8-second recharge, so to fully replenish all 3 you need to allow 24 seconds.

Tier 7 – Level 100:

Bloodtalons:

I usually always take bloodtalons unless I am in a 2s game for example against double DPS, then I will take feral frenzy to the extra burst damage to try and land a kill faster. Bloodtalons benefits a lot from snapshotting which I have mentioned throughout this post, I will now explain more about it:

Snapshotting is when any effect increasing bleed damage, for example bloodtalons applied to a rip and rake, means if you renew those bleeds through a ferocious bite for example, you will keep the bloodtalons effect that was active on that rip, meaning once you’ve applied your bloodtalons with a rip, if you can keep the rip active you keep the bloodtalons effect active on that bleed.

Just for a bit of seperation with the talents and to keep this webpage at a reasonable size, please click through to the next page and I will break down the PvP talents.