I got a nudge or two about the talent calculator image I made back in the Battleground Kitty Mark Beta 1 Bleeder Roger talent discussion post some ways back. Mostly, they jabbed me and pointed out that I somehow keep accidentally disabling comments. Not sure how that came to be. Maybe the powers that be deemed you weren’t worthy of talking. Nah, just kiddin’, I love you guys.
OMG Skip, we love you too, you sexy beast of an Internet you. But no, seriously, like what’s up with that image and how do you do it?
A valid and stunningly accurate question/observation. My primary reason for cooking up the above was size. When I screen shottied the talent tree as I liked it, the image was obscenely large. 100s of KB, and I don’t mean Killing Blows. When I shrank it down and killed the quality, the numbers (see also: the important part) were unreadable. I could go back and type over it, but that would be taking the easy way out. No, I have to be different.
Enter a little tool called Grease Monkey. Grease Monkey is a heady little Firefox Add-On that lets you inject scripts into live pages to alter their appearance or functionality. We (yes, both you and I) are going to use this to alter how WoWHead’s Talent Calculator looks.
Start by getting Firefox. Done? That didn’t take long. I bet you already had it.
Now, Install Grease Monkey into Firefox. It installs like any other Firefox Add-On, so if you have trouble, there’s docs out there somewhere. I’m not a help desk (at least not on off hours), so if I’m moving a bit fast, I do apologize.
All done? You should have a little monkey head in the bottom right of your screen. He smiles when he’s on and frowns when he’s off. Right-click him and choose “New User Script…”.
This is where we create our script. Name is the name of the script. Call it “Fandangly Weasel” for all I care. Namespace is “http://morebarsthanyou.skipcocoa.net/”, cuz I wrote it! Description is self-explanatory too. “Fandangly Weasel chews threw the cables on the Internetz for me.” Or you can write something useful. Includes are just one line: “http://www.wowhead.com/?talent*”. The * means it’ll alter any and all WoWHead talent pages. There are no Excludes.
If this is your first time using Grease Monkey, it’ll want to know where your preferred text editor is. If you don’t have a preference, you can just find Notepad.exe in your Windows directory, if Windows is your poison. Anything that can edit .TXT files will work fine too. When it comes time to actually write your intimidating script, you’re just going to copy and paste my work:
function addGlobalStyle(css) {
var head, style;
head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (!head) { return; }
style = document.createElement('style');
style.type = 'text/css';
style.innerHTML = css;
head.appendChild(style);
}
addGlobalStyle('.iconmedium div.icon-bubble {background:black;font-family:Impact;font-size:24px;left:26px;line-height:14px;width:16px;}');
addGlobalStyle('.talentcalc-main div div {background:black;}');All we’re essentially doing is saying “change the styling to be like this”. No actual talent calc functionality is altered. It just turns the backgrounds to black and makes the numbers big with the Impact font. You can change the word Impact to another font, though you may have to toy with the font size and positioning.
Now, with the script saved… You didn’t? Well, I didn’t think I had to tell you. Save it, please. Good. Now, with the script saved, head on over to the WoWHead Talent Calc and punch in a class and some numbers. You should already see your massive numbers and black backgrounds. If not, well, I guess go over it again. It could be any number of things, and I can’t say what for sure. Once you have your tree all prettified, press the Lock link to solidify it, then take a screenshot of it.
From here, it’s your usual image editing magic. I use GIMP, so I’ll continue from that point of view. Feel free to leave at this stage or stick around and snicker quietly at me if you’re a self-important Photoshop user.
I paste the screenshot in as a new image, use the Rectangle tool (the very top left button) to draw around the area of importance, then crop the image (Image Menu > Crop to selection). I then resize it to about 300 pixels wide (Image Menu > Scale Image), and save it as a .PNG file.
This gets me about a 100KB image, but I can do way better. Close it out and reopen the new file in GIMP again. Don’t ask my why I have to do this, GIMP just gives me better quality if I apply the next step to the finished image and not the working file. PNG images work with color palettes, and so can be shrunk way down by decreasing the number of colors. Go to the Image Menu > Mode > Indexed… For the talent trees, I choose “Use web-optimized palette” with “Remove unused colors from colormap” checked and Dithering set to “None”. Some of the colors strip out, but the general look is retained and the image size ends up around 20KB when saved. It’s a solid improvement for modern, image-saturated blogs.
And your fortune cookie for the evening:
WATCH FOR FALLING ROCKS – NEXT 5 MILES
Addendum: Since I figure I covered this about as haphazardly as humanly possible, I went and started a thread on Blog Azeroth on the topic with for to discuss details I didn’t cover well enough. If you’re not a member of Blog Azeroth, and you’re a WoW blogger, I suggest you memberify yourself before you dismemberify yourself (made that up all by myself, hot dog). Topic discussion be heres: http://blogazeroth.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2001&p=9681
Technical Specifications
Name: Feral Aggression
Class: Druid
Spec: Feral
Tier: 1
Ranks: 5
Abilities Influenced:
Feral Aggression. The world hates you, you do realize that? You are a five rank talent with benefits many wouldn’t pay 2 points for, and you sit next to one of the Feral essentials. You’ve been a very bad talent. Very bad indeed.
Oh, hm, yes, this is going a direction no one wants to see it go, so let’s step back and be objective for a moment. We’ll finish this later, Feral Aggression.
Why the Feral Aggression hate? Why is it the case that, in the words of the immortal Ackbar, “it’s a trap!”
Let’s first look at the competition, Ferocity. Ferocity is also a five point, tier 1 talent. It’s effect is that it reduces the cost of Maul, Swipe (kitty gets one now too), Claw, Rake and Mangle (both Cat and Bear versions) by 1 point of Rage or Energy per rank. At all five ranks, that’s five less Energy and Rage per attack on all of the basic toe-to-toe attacks in your arsenal.
Let’s single out the kitty kitty attacks a moment, since Bear is something of a fuzzier line. (Haha, fuzzier! See what I did there? You can’t unread it!) Kitty starts with 100 energy. She refills that energy at 10 points per second. A Claw costs her 45 energy. So, she attacks with Claw, she has 55 energy left. During the 1.5 second global cooldown, she’ll get back 15 energy. We’re at 70, so we’re only at a net loss of 30 points. Next claw drops us to 25, and we’re at 40 after the GCD.
At a cost of 5 less, our energy goes 100, Claw, 60, GCD, 75, Claw, 35, GCD, 50, Claw, 10. We got in a whole extra claw before we had to pause to regain energy. I guess what I mean to say in all too many words is that 5 less energy adds up really fast when you are literally blasting these attacks out one after another.
I had said Bear’s issue was fuzzier. I say this mainly because Bear runs on Rage. Rage comes of attacking and being attacked and if Bear is the center of much brutal attention, Rage management tends not to be an issue. In massive raids, tanks will often tell you they simply can’t use up their Rage. It comes piped in like that kid who cheated at water gun fights by using the hose. You know which kids you are, and know fear. For kids like I will find you and have our revenge. Accounts will come due!
Er, so Bears. What does Bear get? HUGE discount prices! A Swipe only costs 20 Rage. Now it costs 15. 25% off! Maul costs 15. Now 10! 33% off! All Rage must go! It makes being a Bear pretty darn cheap, though we look back again at situation. If Rage will never be an issue, maybe we’ll consider taking…
Feral Agression
Oh, snap! I almost forgot this wasn’t a Ferocity article. I think you feel sufficiently stupid for not taking Ferocity. Let’s try to salvage that, put it in a jar, and take it out later when you’re feeling confident and secure, because we can’t have that. FA has two effects:
- It improves the attack power debuff of Demoralizing Roar by 8% per rank (40% at max).
- It improves the damage of Ferocious Bite by 3% per rank (15% at max).
Since Kitty went first last time, let’s keep on the Bear train. Demoralizing Roar, at glorious level 80, reduces Attack Power by 411 to everyone around you for 30 seconds at the cost of 10 Rage. It’s a tanking ability, obviously. It reduces damage you take from things that plink at you, and is essentially identical to the Warrior’s Demoralizing Shout. You just, you know, roar instead. With points in FA, you now reduce Attack Power by 575.
Skip, numbers make my head hurt. Just tell me if it’s good or not.
Truth be told, I’m not a Theorycraftist. But I’m very good at stealing knowledge from Theorycraftists, and the results are good. Attack Power mileage bounces around a bit, depending on boring things we won’t talk about, but the down and dirty result seems to be that this shines best in the raid environment. You know, that place we said your Rage would rain from the sky to nourish the seeds of your wrath into blooming blossoms of carnage and ruin. Rough numbers put the damage turned away by a roar to be somewhere between 9% and 18%, depending on the phase of the moon and what you had for dinner. An improved roar does, just like it says, 40% more of that. Simple math? Not in my house! That 9% to 18% becomes 12.6% and 25.2%. That’s an improvement of “it doesn’t matter, because you’re a Tank and your job is to take things that make you live, stupid”.
Result: Bear Raid Tank wants Feral Aggression. Bear Raid Tank only wants Ferocity if he finds Rage is an issue.
Kitty. You get +15% to Ferocious Bite. Ferocious Bite is Kitty’s main spike damage attack. It makes one big number, but fails to compete in raw, sustained damage against anything that can survive the spike. And in a raid, such a spike is just going to piss off whatever you bit, where it will promptly turn you into Meow Mix. And since it uses up all of your Energy in the process, good luck defending yourself.
No, Ferocious Bite quickly makes its home amidst the PvP world, where it is designed to rip a player’s head off with a savage ?k crit. Since FB makes such massive numbers, 15% more of it is not a bad thing, really. Would you rather have 15% of a cake, or 30% of a cupcake? The problem falls in with point starvation. You need to ride the Feral trolley down to Rend and Tear, because the +25% crit is vital. Ferocious Bite needs to crit to show its teeth, figuratively and literally. That double damage with +15% means really +30% damage. You’ll want Predatory Instincts to boost your crit damage another 10%, again feeding on the whole percentage of massive numbers theme we’ve got decorating. And you’re going to want every drop of crit chance you can muster, possibly investing into Master Shapeshifter way down the Resto tree. After all of that, you’re going to have to give up on some good talents to make it all fit. And then the moment of truth arrives. You build up those combo points, you lock onto your target and you give them the bite of doom… and it doesn’t crit. Yeah, you’re pretty much boned…
Sour grapes, that is. Here, chase it down with a fortune cookie.
If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings, though I suspect he knew flying coach was cramped enough with the limbs we already had.
Battleground Kitty Mark Beta 1 Bleeder Roger, WoW 3.2.2
It’s been my desire to get my Critty Kitty into proper PvP order before I hit 80. I know it’s really not worth considering until then, but I’m impatient. I think what I have now is an upright and proper bleed build. I know bleeds are mostly a PvE sustained damage thing and PvP is all about the crit spikes, but Ferocious Bite just keeps giving me reasons to hate it. I want to like it, but it refuses to obey.
This here Kitty doesn’t have a lot of survival built in. A few points were taken in for concession, but our main goal here is stealth, stun, bleed, Shred. We don’t start fair fights. We find fair fights and make them unfair.
Feral Talent Overview
Ferocity – Required for Feral. We don’t ask, we just do. Even if we’re considering Feral Aggression, we still take Ferocity too. We aren’t. Like I said, me and Ferocious Bite are having a tiff.
Feral Instinct – Necessary for proper Prowling.
Savage Fury – +20% damage to your primary attacks? Yes please.
Feral Swiftness – +30% movement speed. As a melee attacker, your mobility is vital to your existence.
Sharpened Claws – +6% Crit. The crit game begins!
Shredding Attacks – Shred is really not useful without this talent. The cost is way too high. This lops off about a third of that, raising the damage a lot.
Predatory Strikes – We’re mostly taking this to meet prereqs, but it does offer a lump of attack power, so we won’t sneeze at it. It also offers up the chance at instant cast healing. Since our mana bar isn’t getting used for much else, it’s a readily available source of health. Pop off a Maim on your opponent, heal yourself, then jam back into kitty shape before they can shake it off.
Primal Fury – While unpredictable, we’re loading the dice on this one with as much crit as possible. There are few things as deadly or as satisfying as those moments where you rack up 5 combo points in just three attacks.
Brutal Impact – This only adds 1 second to the stun of your Pounce. One second may not seem like much, but if they don’t trinket out, that’s one more Shred which is one more chance to get a combo point or two, which may open up that 5 point Maim or Rip that spells their doom.
Feral Charge – It’s not just for Bears anymore. A lot of people give FC the shrug, but it’s an amazing gap-closer. As a kitty, it will not break stealth, so you can open up with a Pounce or to just tease your opposition. While it doesn’t technically interrupt casting in Cat Form, you can make a player’s spell fizzle by quickly leaping behind them before they get the cast off.
Heart of the Wild – I actually let this slide in a lot of my builds, as 5 points is a lot of investment for what I consider to be less of an attack power improvement than people give it credit for. Still, we’re going all-out on the damage here, so we’ll listen to the masses and take it.
Survival of the Fittest – Yes yes, this is a tanking talent. While I said we’d be mostly ignoring defense, this talent is the origin of the word “mostly”. There’s a lot to love. The crit resistance mimics the effects of PvP Resilience to a degree. The +6% to all attributes will result in a small damage and survivability increase. And in a pinch, you’re better equipped to tank an AV boss than most.
Leader of the Pack – This talent is not only amazing for you, but makes several other classes your best of friends. +5% crit for one point is amazing. Getting to share it is icing on the cake.
Primal Tenacity – With only one point in it, this one got a point as pure filler, and didn’t get Rank 3 due to a lack of spare points to finish it off. Fear is a bothersome fact of life in PvP, though we’ve got Berserk to bust out of it once every three minutes. This point could’ve gone just about anywhere above it and still provided similar benefit.
Predatory Instincts – I filled this 2 out of 3 points primarily as filler, but it’s filler with nice effects. The AoE damage isn’t as lethal as it would be in a raid, but in a packed map like AV, they are a reality. The bonus damage to crits shows itself more and more as we buff our crit chance to the sky, and will help negate the Resilience our opponents will be stacking.
Infected Wounds – Because Mangle and Shred will be your main attacks, the Infected Wounds disease will almost always be on anyone you face, ensuring they’re always moving around at a crawl. While anything that can remove a disease can clear it off, that means it works equally well as a cover-effect to help keep other class diseases from being stripped so easily. Make friends with a Death Knight using Pestilence, and watch as he turns a field of enemies into snails for the slaughtering.
King of the Jungle – This ability will serve you two fold. You can now use your Tiger’s Fury to instantly generate 60 energy, essential for turning it up to 11 on a stunlocked victim. Second, it reduces the cost of your Cat/Bear shapechanging by a massive amount. While you’ll usually be a Cat, dropping in and out of form is your primary means of breaking CC effects like ice and roots, which can get very expensive very fast. Shapechanging will cost next to nothing for our build.
Mangle – Just take it. And take Improved Mangle to make it cheaper. This is not optional.
Rend and Tear – This sort of dictates your tactics now. You’ll often find someone already engaged in a fight, Pounce or Fairy Fire depending on situation, Rake and Mangle to prime the bleeding, then Shred wildly.
Primal Gore – Rip is probably your least favorite attack in PvP, but it has the luxury of doing the largest total damage of any of your finishing moves plus it ignores armor. With your massive crit chance, this is a huge damage buff to an already intimidating attack. Drop one on any opponent with a lot of health or armor where you know your other attacks aren’t going to finish the job anytime soon.
Berserk – You mostly want this as a fear break, but the 50% cheaper attacks come along as a nice bonus.
Resto Talent Overview
Improved Mark of the Wild – BG Ferals don’t typically take this one, because chances are there’ll be a tree around to offer up an improved pink paw for you. I think the +2% attribute bonus makes it worth it, however small it may be. Along side Survival of the Fittest, it’s nearly as good as running around with a permanent Blessing of Kings. Rarely do people pass out buffs in BGs after getting out of the gate anyways. Don’t rely on them for your buffs.
Furor – Skip, you only took 4 points in Furor! WTF?!
Chills, man. Let’s do the math right quick. Furor lets me keep up to 20 points of energy per rank, assuming it would’ve generated that much in the time I spent away from Kitty. Furor is important in PvP because we often have to break out of Cat Form to escape CC effects, and we want the energy waiting for us when we get back. Energy generates at a speed of 10 energy per second. When I return to Cat Form, there’s a 1.5 second global cooldown before I can actually act. In that 1.5 seconds, I’ll generate 15 energy. With 4 ranks in Furor, I’ll make it back to kitty form with 80 energy, then make 15 more before I can act. I’m only losing out on 5 energy. That’s a fair exchange for a talent point, I feel.
Naturalist – +10% extra raw damage. Not bad for a tree talent. Not bad for any talent.
Natural Shapeshifter – Prereq. Many call this talent next to useless, and if we were considering PvP, maybe it would be. But, since we’re using our shapechange as a method of freedom, it carries its weight some.
Omen of Clarity – Happiness is! Almost anything you do has a chance of procing OoC, giving you a free attack. Generally considered vital to the Feral offensive, you’ll find yourself getting off many more attacks this way.
Master Shapeshifter – Many consider this talent to not be worth the investment it takes to get here. If Natural Shapeshifter isn’t worth beans to you, it’s like paying 5 points for +4% crit. Still, you already paid 3 for +6% and 1 for +5%, right? It’s called diminishing returns. If you want more, you gotta pay. Me, I want it.
Feral Talents That Didn’t Make the Cut
Survival Instincts – It didn’t get dropped for lack of awesome, but it’s really only a necessity when tanking. I said up-front we were sacrificing some survivability, though I may consider swapping it for that lone Primal Tenacity point.
Primal Precision – It was hard to give this talent up. It was really handy while leveling, and I’d still recommend it in a PvE build. Accuracy is less of an issue in PvP, as attacking from behind removes a lot of the player’s avoidance right off.
Nurturing Instincts – I really like this talent. Agility is your main stat, so while the benefit won’t make you a raid healer, it’s a minor investment for a huge return. It’s pretty common to toss a HoT or two up, then go into Cat Form and engage the enemy, gaining both benefits of the talent at the same time for the start of the encounter. It didn’t make it on the list due to sheer point starvation, but is a candidate for that stray point floating around.
Natural Reaction – Strictly a Bear Tank talent. It also has to compete with some beefy talents at its tier.
Improved Leader of the Pack – This was another hard one to let go. You’re pretty loopy if you don’t bring this one along on a raid, but it’s just not that useful in PvP. The heal is great for taking pressure off of the healers in a group, but since most PvP exchanges only last a few flurries, you’re just not going live to see any worthwhile benefit. The mana replenishment ensures that you are never dry, but we have very little need for it to begin with.
And now your fortune cookie:
If one in the hand is worth two in the bush, someone has a very high opinion of their hand.
Bear and Critty Kitty have been leveling in Outlands at the speed of wtf. Despite my desperate attempts to do other things like fish and cook and level my Enchanting, I keep accidentally gaining levels. And as I did, Bear finally had nothing better to do and took Mangle.
It should be noted that I have been avoiding taking Mangle. The reason for this is that everyone has been telling me how important it is to all Feral existence, and as such, I dug my heels in and refused. “Eat your Mangle,” mom would say, “it’s good for you. There are starving gold farmers in China who would gladly take your Mangle.” And I threw myself on the floor, kicked madly in a ferocious tantrum, and took more Resto talents instead. But Resto talents are for dessert and soon my teeth rotted out and the collective WoW community got to say “I told you so.”
So, Bear took Mangle, posed as Critty Kitty, and promptly began slapping around all in his path with impunity. We’ve already discussed that Bear is a studly beast in his own right, but when he begins being a better cat than Critty, I realize I have to eat my pride and slink back to the respec button.
Moral: Take Mangle. Replace Claw. Don’t look back.
I play a Feral Druid. More accurately, I play a Feral/Feral Druid. I got my dual-spec at the ripe age of level 50, funded almost entirely by Auction House racketeering, and decided just recently that any hope of playing a caster on spec #2 was a lost hope. My caster gear was an unmitigated mess and I existed in a perpetual state of OOM. I’m just too used to casting with my Shaman. Water Shield > You. Now flirting into the lower 60′s of the leveling game (no I haven’t an 80 yet, thus I realize my worth as a human being is nill), money is becoming available, and so I wiped my slate of cat-bear-feral-hybrid-mess / “I’m not spamming moonfare and I’m still OOM”-Boomkin and went double Feral Cat-focus/Bear-focus.
I’d always ignored Bear. He’s a nice guy, but he was really just a means to level 20 where Critty Kitty took over, and only ever came out in groups when we bit off more than we could chew and situation demanded I take over aggro for a while. Bear moved like a snail, did little to no damage, and wasn’t near durable enough to make up for points A and B. Now that Bear is no longer sharing talents with Kitty, he’s a burly force to be feared. The heavens split in fear of Bear. What was a slow trod is a confident, loping gait. What was lackluster damage is now wide, crushing blows that would cleft mountains. Sub-par damage mitigation has become the dense, iron-sided fury of an infantry crushing M1 Abrams battle tank! Bear is an Olympian demigod striding patiently across the plains of the Outlands, backhanding the insignificant mortals who dare cross his wide path.
I really like Bear.
Critty Kitty, who probably saw the better side of the talent tree beforehand, has only seen a mild improvement. She traveled deeper into the Resto tree to get Master Shapeshifter with her Omen of Clarity. The +4% crit seemed worth while, and with the frequent instant-cast heals she gets from Predatory Strikes, the prerequisite, Natural Shapeshifter, actually sees use too when I quickly pop in and out of form to heal. I’ve also been introduced to Shredding Attacks, which I’d ignored before in favor of pointless damage mitigation. Now Shred is actually useful and fun. I’m really looking forward to King of the Jungle, as I’m expecting that +60 energy burst to be pure devastation. Once I’m far enough along to round off the game with the various bleed and Shred enhancing talents, I may consider tweaking her towards PvP. I always played her like a Combat Rogue, and I think it’d be fun to get some back gank action going.
Still, I long for the idea of a Bear/Cat hybrid. I pop between specs now depending on the encounters I expect, but I’d ultimately like to be able to find a build in which I can swap between Bear and Kitty as the situation demands. Cat seems to manage with damage without a lot of focus, while Bear requires some investment for his durability to meet my expectations, so I expect it’ll be a Bear-heavy build with some Cat concessions that meet my style. I really don’t know yet.
Current Builds as of 64:
Critty Kitty: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGMsfr0bxR0uZ0Eczb:yVZ0
Bear: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGscrdcIRcZbA0z:zMZM
There are already things I’d like to change, but I’ll feel that out as I go.
