Druid Talents How-to

Well, I finally logged on and re-built Amanna. I must say I didn’t miss the 2 or 3 days I didn’t play given all the furor in the forums, the rolling restarts, etc. etc. It was kind of nice to spend a few nights on other pursuits and log back in to a (relatively) sane environment.

That is, of course with the exception of add-ons. While some are available for 2.0 many of the others I’ve come to rely on haven’t been updated yet. And even if they are, most of the download websites are very slow at best.

The really fun part though was getting a free re-spec. I’d been looking at the Talent Calculator for a few weeks now trying to figure out what I wanted to do. My assumption was that I’d stay feral - I like the gameplay and it would be hard to part with the gear I’ve gotten hold of. I have to admit though, the Resto tree intriqued me. I thought Blizzard did a good job of putting some very useful talents in there. While I didn’t play around too much, it looked like you could get a pretty buff healer for end-game. Balanace didn’t really intrique me all that much, although I noticed one of our Druids in Moonkin form last night.

So the decision was to go Feral, then it’s just a matter of distributing points, right? No, then comes the task of “what can I live without and what do I have to have?” This wasn’t too bad, but I did have to make some hard tradeoffs. Especially since the BC calculators let you play with 61 talent points.

I ended up with this build. I knew I wanted Mangle to try it out (and I can tell you it is definitely worth it). Here’s the rest of my thinking:

• I knew I wanted Focus for those few rage points right when switching forms. Intensity seemed to be a natural follow-up, especially with the added bonus of +mana while casting. In the end I decided to postpone this until BC. With primarily being in raids and high level instances, rage generation hasn’t been too much of a problem.
• Omen of Clarity was high on my list and a hard one to drop. With one of the goals of a feral build is getting a lot of crits both in bear and cat forms, it seemed like Omen would get you a lot of free swipes. In the end, I had to spend too many points to get down to it, so it got postponed also. I’ve not used Omen of Clarity before, but this was probably my hardest tradeoff. I was really looking forward to using it.
• Shredding Attacks and Blood Frenzy were also postponed. I was trying to maximize the value of my points, so I avoided abilities that were either cat only. I did end up having to take 1 point in Blood Frenzy to get down to Mangle.
• I initially wanted Survival of the Fittest, but ended up happily bypassing it. A 3% increase in stats really didn’t seem all that worth it for 3 talent points, even with the crit reduction.

Those were the talents I had on my list that I didn’t take. Some of the others higher in the tree, just didn’t interest me. I don’t normally tank in my guild so I don’t need threat enhancements, and have never found myself needing extra speed in cat (at least not often enough to warrant a couple talent points).

So, that’s what I went. What did you guys go with and what was your reasoning?