You can find the full list of glyphs by clicking on this link. (the list was so long that I made a separate page on this site that I can keep updated instead of embedding them in this post).

They have been split into prime, major, & minor glyphs. Note that this list probably isn’t final.

Some Prime  highlights are: The Wrath glyph (Your wrath does 10% more damage to targets afflicted by insect swarm), and starsurge (when starsurge deals damage, it reduces the cooldown on starfall by 5 sec). Lifebloom glyph now increases it’s crit chance by 20%.

The winner for most confusing prime: Regrowth glyph (Regrowth HOT will automatically refresh it’s duration on targets at or below 25% health). I’m not even really sure what that means.

Major glyph highlights: Thorns reduces it’s cooldown by 20%, Roots (reduces the cast time of roots by 100%) go moonkin PvP!, and healing touch (each HT reduces the cooldown on Nature’s Swiftness by 5 sec)

So, go see the full list now. I’ve marked which ones haven’t changed with the word (unchanged), but I still kept a brief description of the effect so you could remember what it does now.

Also, regarding the new glyph system: there are 3 prime, 3 major, and 3 minor glyph slots total at max level. The UI looks like this:

Also, it was brought to my attention that bears actually don’t have prime glyphs for tanking (with only 2 prime glyphs even being useable in bear form, 1 of which is mangle’s DPS increase glyph). They obviously need to add in more glyphs in some places, so this is really just a first pass at them.

So, now we have 4 different races to choose from when leveling a new druid, which gives us 4 starter zones: Night Elf & Worgen for the Alliance, and Tauren & Troll for the Horde. Trolls even have a new level 1 to 5 starter experience that I tried out a couple times and have had a lot of fun with.

The new talent trees are actually better for people who are new to the game and starting out leveling, since it will be harder to make the wrong decision (like going and putting 10 points in each talent tree at the start), as there should be fewer bad talent traps for people to fall in.

The biggest improvement for druids, however, is the level at which we get early abilities in the 1 to 20 level range.

Leveling 1 to 20 as feral in Cataclysm:

• You still have to caster level from 1 to 8, which shouldn’t be that bad, given the staring area questing improvements and having pretty much unlimited mana.
• At level 8, you get: Cat form, claw, Rake, & Ferocious Bite.
• At level 10, you get mangle
• At level 15, you get: bear form, maul, growl, & demo roar (engough tanking abilities to start tanking).

Leveling 1 t0 20 as balance:

• From 1 to 8, you pick up: wrath, moonfire, thorns, roots & starfire.
• At level 10, you get Starsurge from the talent tree.
• At level 20, you get insect swarm.

So, both feral & balance druids have enough spells & abilities to level fairly quickly up to 20 and beyond!

For feral, getting cat form at level 8 is a HUGE quality of life improvement, and you still get bear form at the level where the random dungeon system opens up and you can start tanking. I have had a lot of fun leveling a lowbie troll kitty druid up to the mid/late 30′s just because cat form has been so much fun for leveling through all the new & improved quest zones.

Balance druid leveling hasn’t been changed that much, with the biggest improvement for leveling coming from having starsurge as our level 10 balance spell. The knockdown effect helps with survivability, since it reduces the damage you take. As a cooldown ability, starsurge has higher burst damage and will help to break up rotations so that they feel less spammy. They also gave us starfire earlier. In addition, insect swarm is trainable now, rather than a talent, which means you actually get Insect Swarm earlier now than you used to, as well.

They seem to be front-loading a lot of our damage abilities so that we have access to more buttons sooner for feral & balance. An earlier cat form means that feral druids can now actually be feral druids sooner, and overall the changes to leveling design will make druids actually fun to level from 1 to 20, rather than the first 20 levels being what you wanted to get past so that the fun could start.

So, at the very least, I’m excited to start my new worgen druid when Cataclysm comes out in a few months. I’ve even avoided doing alliance leveling quests from level 15 to 60, so that I could have some fun surprises in store for me when I started on my leveling adventure. This is the one thing I am really excited about.

Recently (as in late last night, or early this morning) I got suckered recruited into being a moderator on the Moonkin Repository’s forums, to help out with keeping things running smoothly. (The position comes with a free can of troll repellent, or so I hear).

In addition to adding me as a moderator, there are other changes up for discussion related to TMR. The most exciting of which (that impacts a lot of my readers) is the possibility of expanding into having a restoration druid & feral druid forum, in addition to the currently existing moonkin one. These new forums (after some discussion) will likely be separate forums that are all cross-linked together (so, you would have something like: the moonkin repository, the resto repository, and the feral repository – or whatever the name of each forum would be).

There is one discussion going on in the WoW druid forums. There is also additional information in the original post on TMR, as well as more recent updates about conclusions made from the feedback they received. Please go and express your opinions on the idea (either positive or negative feedback is welcome). You can also give your opinion on what the new forums should be named.

Also, if the resto & feral forums DO go live, we’re going to need the support of other resto & feral druids to help with increasing publicity, generally posting there and being helpful, and potentially even volunteers to help moderate those forums.

If it’s something you think we should do and something you think you would visit, please let me know. I know one person expressed concern about the resto forums possibly stepping on the toes of other forums like the Plus Heal forums, however I haven’t seen a big resto druid presence on the plus heal forums in a while.

It’s going to take some time to get a resto & feral forum up and running, but I will make sure to post updates here as things develop.

So, what do you guys think? Are the new forums a good idea? bad idea? Is a new feral & resto forum something that you would use, or think the community needs?

Moonkin Form Ghostcrawler’s post (click here):

At first we were trying to make it more of an option, so that cuddly-hating Balance druids could choose the spec without the shapeshift. After much discussion though, we’re going to go back to a Balance druid = Moonkin Form design. We’ll put some more damage into the Moonkin Form.

So, part of the problem that people had with moonkin form in Cata was that there wasn’t enough damage tied to it. With Furor giving the same int bonus in & out of moonkin form, that made it even more true (at this point, moonkin form is basically just an armor bonus & the group haste buff on the current beta build). So, it sounds like they’re going to have to make moonkin form more useful by adding more damage back to the form. That should make it something people still want to use. They did increase the damage portion tied to Master shapeshifter, but I think they should tie some damage increase directly back into the form.

Tree form’s movement speed debuff – GC’s post (click here):

I suspect we won’t end up keeping the snare on Tree of Life. We knew that we could try snare and then remove it. We would have a hard time trying no snare and then adding one. Our intent was to make you think about when was the best time to push ToL rather that just hitting it the second it’s off cooldown. In practice though we just think it feels crappy so even if it accomplishes our goal, it’s probably not worth it.

Part of the problem with the tree snare is that it doesn’t just make us have to think about when to use it – it makes the form dangerous to the guild’s progress if we use it at the wrong time. We should be choosing to use it when we need to do more healing, not when we know we’ll have a chance to stand still for 45 seconds (how often does that actually happen?). I’ve been saying for a while that I wanted the snare reduced or removed. I’ll be happy if it goes and we can actually choose to use it at the points in the fight when we need to do the most healing.

Changes to restoration Tier 1 & 2:GC says for the feral druids that:

“We have actually swapped Furor (now in Feral) and Heart of the Wild (now in Resto).”

In addition, Naturalist is now in Tier 2 restoration (reducing the cast time on nourish & healing touch

The latest talent announcements have done a good job of increasing the number of useful talents that are early resto tree so that now you get to make actual choices in your early talent decisions. There are still probably too many passive healing bonuses in the resto tree, but now you at least get to choose the talents. Beta talent changes are usually a slow process. One step at a time.

I updated my armchair-designer, War Tools suggestion talents to update to the current changes in the build, and adding a little bit more to the talent changes (like adding an improved regrowth-type talent to resto to reduce regrowth’s cast time & increase healing done, adding another effect to fury of the stormrage, increasing the swiftmend cooldown reduction by Nature’s Bounty etc).

On podcasts:

• If you missed it, I was on Blue Plz with Total Biscuit last week. Some of the talent info is slightly outdated, given that there have been 2 talent builds since then, but it was still a lot of fun!
• On Monday, August 2nd, I’m going to be on another podcast – Gaming Worlds Collide with Esh And Kat.  You can find a direct link to the show info here. The show is at 6:30 EST (3:30 PST).

And More! Malfurion Stormrage got a new look. You can find the new graphic at MMO-champion. He got wings, and grew out his beard, and got some claw feet. It’s interesting, and definitely more epic than the old model, but it still feels strange. I’m not sure if I like it or not.

I made another “fake” feedback talent calculator based on the last build, which you can find here. It has some moonkin & resto changes, without changes to feral past tier 2.

I made a beta forum post with explanations of what I changed to go along with that “fake” feedback talent build. However, since a lot of people can’t post on the beta forums, you can always post feedback here on the blog.

They are mostly fixes where they fleshed out the talent trees a little bit more so that we could actually beta test without being totally broken. In the previous build, we were fighting bugs like some of us having our talents reset after every time we logged or turned in a quest.

The new current build actually looks a lot like the “fake” feedback talent trees I made a couple patches ago, after they put in the first draft of their 31-point talent trees. That mostly just means that we got important talents put back in (like moonkin form, typhoon, etc), and that they didn’t really do much new designing to the actual talents.

That means they still have a lot of work to make druid talent trees a lot more fun before things go live.

That said, lets look at the goodies we got this patch:

Highlights of the Latest talent changes for moonkin:

• Lunar justice is gone – this is a good change, since the talent was pretty lame in the smaller talent trees, since it was something anyone would skip for PvP or raiding since you’d never be in melee range to benefit from it. It was essentially a leveling talent or a “neat” toy that didn’t really serve a functional purpose.
• More resto-friendly talents in the first 2 tiers (For example, Nature’s Majesty crit % increase is back)
• Earth & Moon is back, along with moonkin form & typhoon.
• Improved Eclipse removed – this is good, since it was incompatible with the change to Eclipse that makes faster Eclipse Power gains make the buff shorter, negating any real damage bonus. I already didn’t like how many points we were spending on improving Eclipse, anyway.

Highlights of the latest talent changes for resto:

• Master Shapeshifter added back into the talent trees, requiring Natural Shapeshifter. This is going to be an interesting decision, since that puts 9 talent points-worth of talents for feral & moonkin in the first 2 tiers of the resto tree, and you’ll have to decide if Natural/master shape-shifter is worth the 4 point investment.
• Gift of the Earth Mother was properly added back into the talent tree, so we got back the instant heal from rejuvenation.
• Other talents were shifted around to compensate for Swiftmend being properly removed from the talent tree.
• Empowered Rejuvenation is marked as “to be redesigned”, most likely because there are too many flat bonuses to increased HOT healing in the talent trees and it’s still redundant.

Conclusions:

Feral also got a couple bug fixes (like Mangle working now). Also, as Verdus pointed out in the comments, Heart of the Wild is back in Tier 1 feral, which would be an interesting addition to any resto or moonkin’s talent builds.

I basically consider this build to be the “bug fix” patch, since they mostly just added back in the talents required to have a functional talent tree, without really making any of the super interesting changes they have been making to other classes. At this point, I feel like the druid talents got back to where all the other classes were last patch, and now everyone else is still ahead of us in development. Notice how I didn’t talk about talents other than ones that already existed before. rather than new talents. There are also still a ton of really boring talents that do nothing but increase damage or healing, and feral doesn’t have many changes this pass.

However, now that we have all these fixes to the talent tree, I finally have something I can give actual feedback on, since I couldn’t test balance druids without things like moonkin form in the talent tree. I’ll have more feedback posts later on over the next couple days as I do more testing.

Slowly but surely, we’ll keep working on things to get something a little more fun for druids in Cata.