I feel like expanding on yesterdays post. I can't skip over six odd levels of druid experience in a paragraph.
I did some reading on druid talent specs and went for a feral/restoration build with 11 points in restoration for the Omen of Clarity. The Omen essentially gives Maesyn a free heal or attack at some random point during a fight. As it can occur at any time it normally ends up as being a free Claw. I'm not totally bowled away with it but on the way to the talent I picked up Furor which is a 100% chance to get some rage/energy after a shapeshift which is nice. Normally when the druid shifts she has no energy to fight and has to wait which is kinda frustrating. Furor fixes that. It also enables some cool tricks, e.g:
- can switch to bear, instantly bash for a stun and heal (although whenever I try this trick the heal seems to go wrong and give bugger all healing and I'm staring incredulously at 20% health: it's on my todo list to figure out what the problem is: global cooldown?).
- she can switch to bear and then has enough rage to instantly Feral Charge which can work as a spell lock, although it has an annoying 8-30 yard range and the casters always seem to be at 7.5 yards away.
Her current fighting is to prowl up behind something and Pounce which stuns the enemy for four seconds (extended with two talent points), then Shred while still behind. This is quite a devestating combo, it can take half a mobs health in one go. I've done a lot of stealthing in the last few levels and with two talent points in improved stealth you can pretty much do anything around a mob as long as you don't accidently go through it if it suddenly changes direction. She doesn't need to be directly behind to Shred, she can be perpendicular, i.e. stabbing it in the shoulder. With the swiftness talents it isn't too much of a problem to get into position and as I mentioned yesterday it is quite satisfying.
I love travel form: it doesn't seem that much slower than a normal mount but it's so cool being about to change in and out while running and it made the long runs (gadgetzan, desolace) quite tolerable. It's much better for running away than Aspect of the Cheetah as there is less (but still some) chance to be dazed. The game has an annoying bug where it takes it a few seconds to work out that you have left a building and can switch to travel form, like the opposite of the delay between entering a building and being dismounted. When the druid enters a building she is 'dismounted' from travel form to caster rather than the faster cat form so one has to try to preempt this (memo to self: does this 'dismount' cost mana? Prob not, although I don't see any tactical benefits).
As I mentioned yesterday, she has little downtime. If she is low on mana she can wait for enough mana to switch to cat, then idle away some time killing things, after which mana has regenerated for a heal and switch back to cat. I normally use Regrowth for healing as it is more mana efficient than Healing Touch and has a heal-over-time element so she can be some way into a fight before her health dips below 100%. Also worth noting that the HoT from Regrowth appears to stack with the HoT from Regenerate so she normally casts a regenerate immediately after a caster pull.
As a grinding/farming machine the lack of downtime and the speed of travel make the druid a good choice. Just keep away from caster camps!
Peter's Moblog
