I say a little prayer to the holiest of holies, the Bear amongst men…
Oh Dear Bear, what 5 buttons should I press when I am in Feral forms.
I’m a Boomkin (and a bad one at that)
Or maybe I’m a tree (and a bad one at that)
But sometimes I find myself being a cat
or a Bear
and I really have no idea what I am doing.
I know what you are thinking, just stick with what you know, but the problem is, I don’t have that luxury. On the front lines, in the Battlegrounds and arenas, you have to use everything you have got, and a Druid has a hell of a lot.
It’s not like this is even a new character, I’ve had him for close to 6 years, but it has been a long time between swipes, so I just don’t know what I should do, or when, once I hit Cat or Bear form… forms I intend to be in for the shortest possible period of time, but I know that while I am in them, I need to do something useful.
When I’m a cat…
When I’m a cat, it’s because I want to move faster indoors (Dash & Stampeding Roar), I want to track those that are about to rip my innards out, I want to stealth and lay in wait for the silly flag capper. I have my keybindings all laid out so I can use the essential skills in any form, Cyclone, Typhoon, Faerie Fire etc. and then there is my empty cat bar.
I even have macros to enable me to drop into cat and perform some awesome action.
My Cat Skull Bash
#showtooltip Skull Bash(Cat Form)
/cast [stance:1/2/4/5/6] !Cat Form
/cast [nostance] !Cat Form
/cast [nomod, @target] Skull Bash(Cat Form)
/cast [mod:shift, @focus] Skull Bash(Cat Form)
My Cat (or Bear) Stampeding Roar
#showtooltip Stampeding Roar(Cat Form)
/cast [stance:4] !Cat Form
/cast [nostance] !Cat Form
/cast [stance:3] Stampeding Roar(Cat Form)
/cast [stance:1] Enrage
/cast [stance:1] Stampeding Roar(Bear Form)
My Pounce and Shred
#showtooltip Pounce(Cat Form);
/cast [nostance:3] Cat Form(Shapeshift); [nostealth, nocombat] !Prowl(Cat Form); [nostealth, combat] Shadowmeld(Racial); [stealth] Pounce(Cat Form); Shred(Cat Form)
All of which are about getting somewhere faster, or stopping a caster doing what casters do.
But I’m a 3 trick pussy cat…
What should I have on my cat tool bar… and how should I use it… even if it is just a few abilities (hell, the less the better as far as I am concerned), that I should execute to lay down a little more hurt before switching back to more familiar forms.
When I’m a Bear…
When I’m a Bear, one of two things has happened.
- I pressed the Bear button instead of the Cat or Seal buttons
- The shit just got real, the flag room just got filled with people that think the flag I am carrying belongs to them (and no… it’s MINE!).
It might be to drop a Stampeding roar, but it is more likely I will be doing this in Cat form.
It might be to Bash
#showtooltip Bash(Bear Form)
/cast [stance:3, nostealth] Prowl; [stance:3, stealth] Pounce
/cast [stance:2/4/5/6] !Bear Form
/cast [nostance] !Bear Form
/cast Enrage
/cast Bash
But that would only be because I am already in Bear form to avoid all that Horde waste being thrown at the fan.
Really, the only reason I will be in Bear form is because the shit has hit the proverbial fan
Shit meet fan
#showtooltip Frenzied Regeneration(Bear Form)
/cancelaura Enrage
/cast Barkskin
/cast [stance:1] Enrage(Bear Form); Bear Form(Shapeshift)
/cast [stance:1] Survival Instincts(Cat or Bear Form)
/cast [stance:1] Frenzied Regeneration(Bear Form)
and I don’t want to be the shit.
Yes, yes, I know I am popping everything I have to survive… but that’s all I really want to do, I don’t need to save it for another day, I just need to survive the next 30 seconds or so.
But what I have discovered is that these abilities really expect you to do something to be worthwhile… the regen is only as good as the actions that follow… and I have no following moves and I am just as likely in my panic to switch back to Boomkin or Elf form so I can do something useful.
So what Dear Bear should I press when the shit has hit the fan and I want to be more useful than an Boomkin in a Bear skin?
How do I Feral without being (or truly wanting to be) Feral?
Thank you in advance for answering my prayers Dear Bear.
Gnomer Getafix and Out!
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2012/06/02/bear-oh-dear-b…hat-do-i-press/
Armaggedon's coming! 
Wow, a long time since I’ve seen you post Gnomey. Don’t forget to roar in bear! It helps that tiny little bit! And IF, just IF you had time before you went bear, I would put a thorns on myself. But that’s what I do when I’m resto in PvP… those boomies might have some other ideas.
Don’t ask me what to do in cat form. Cat form is for sprinting and stampeding roar. I have no other use for it.
I hope BBB can enlighten you more 🙂 but it’s good to see some movement on your site 🙂
Never considered roar… but I thorn up if and when I remember… thanks for those tips!
Life has been on the “full on” mark for a while now… last 7 weeks have been 16-18 hour day stretches of work with Odin in between.
I’ve even started a few posts, but haven’t had the energy to complete them, or even post them if they come close to satisfaction… Time is both short and passing by so fast.
But rest assured, I am well if tired, and the extended family are all alive and well.
Bears answer when bears are not swamped by real life. Grrr.
Yay a Bear growl for me!
I know where your coming from Bear, I don’t mind being busy the 1st 24 hours of a day, it’s the extras that wear me down. My boss questioned why I claimed 44 hours for a task for last Thursday… but we both agreed it was a close estimate.
Maybe I can lend you my Magely Timewarp… once it’s off cooldown.
Nice to hear a little from you! Life must be stressful if you’ve been turned into a lazer chicken!!!
Umm trying to remember what you have in cat/bear form when you’re boomie/resto. Most of the toolset actually.. however the useful
However the main other things you’ll want apart from pounce in cat is if you have a pesky rogue/feral stick a bleed on them with rake/lacerate – particularly for rogues they can’t remove it so it’ll break their stealth after the 3s delay even if they do cloak/vanish.
BTW – unless you are specced feral you won’t have survival instincts! Particularly since you don’t have much on your bars it might be worth splitting barkskin out and just using it if you need it – you don’t have the damage reduction stuff from feral spec so you might find you need all the time anyway, but often frenzied regen is all you need and if they continuing to beat on you it is just feeding the heals.
Apart from that a good powershift macro so you can free yourself while running away is all I’d recommend (I have a nice one for powershifting regardless of my current form if you want I’ll dig it out). I still tend to fill up my cat/bear bars even when in the caster specs, but your damaging attacks aren’t going to do that much so apart from utility and adding bleeds I wouldn’t worry about the attacks overly much.
Must resist to clean up your macros…
The Druid was toon #2, a long time ago… I seem to remember BoomChicken form had just arrived at the time, as you would see people just standing around changing in and out of form… but it was long forgotton on the creation of Gnomer.
Rake/Lacerate… that’s the kind of stuff I am looking for.. useless in Kitty form yes, but a little less useless.
I have barkskin split out as well… that’s just the “I’m pooping my pants, and I don’t want to go bear, but people are looking at me funny, so guess I better macro”
I have a Boomkin powershift macro, but not one for resto… but hey, while you are dusting off my other macros, no reason why you don’t share your powershift macro… for no other reason that “powershift macro” sounds very cool.
I’ve returned to my ‘first’ toon – well the first one I created on my active server (Jubei’Thos at the time) after I’d settled in for a while… levelling my rogue! Yes I’ve gone truly to the dark side (ok not quite the horde side…)!
Oh I also realised – it’s worth having faire fire (feral) on your cat/bear bars again for rogues/ferals so you can stop them stealthing from range too.
But was that an invitation to clean up macros??? 🙂
I should get around to writing a macros post at some point… but basically the thing I always say when writing a macro is that in almost every case you only need to have the name of spell in the macro once (there are exceptions, e.g. you have a castsequence and a cast of the same spell in the same macro).
It is largely about being cleaner and avoiding hitting the 255 character limit – but there is in theory a slight efficiency reason as well. Macros are evaluated line by line (we proved that back on the wowhead macros forum at some point – you can rewrite a macro within itself) so if you can inline the conditions it is more efficient.
So your skull bash macro would end up looking like:
#showtooltip Skull Bash(Cat Form)
/cast [nostance:3] !Cat Form
/cast [nomod, @target][mod:shift, @focus] Skull Bash(Cat Form)
I’m not sure if that is exactly what you are wanting – I guess you would be happy to skull bash your current target if you are holding down control or alt? If so change the last line to:
/cast [mod:shift, @focus][] Skull Bash(Cat Form)
The [] says to revert to default behaviour (i.e. on your current target or give you the hand if it is a friendly target spell and you have no target). They are evaluated in (left to right) order so, if you are holding shift, focus is your target, otherwise it reverts to default behaviour.
On that particular macro I’d probably set up it to use bear form skull bash rather than shifting to cat – but I’ve run out of macro slots…
Anyway I’ll leave it there!
But my powershift macro is this – pretty simple, but basically I used it to go eat on mages that keep trying to slow me – it just powershifts in whatever form you are in so you can continue doing whatever you are doing. Actually I’ve modified it slightly from mine because I don’t have moonkin form (or tree of life – the spec:1. spec:2 should be right for you druid though). Only slightly annoying thing is it shows the ? icon if you are out of form. You could add a ; Travel Form at the end to put you into travel form if you use it from caster form (or replace Travel Form with your preferred ‘default’ form):
#showtooltip
/cast [stance:1] !Bear Form; [stance:3]!Cat Form; [stance:2] !Aquatic Form; [stance:4] !Travel Form; [stance:5,spec:1] !Moonkin Form; [stance:5,spec:2] !Tree of Life
And one more for good measure – this is my ‘travel’ form macro (which also powershifts on reuse), basically means it uses the best form for where I am… which is pretty much just for use in twin peaks…:
#showtoolip
/cast [swimming] !Aquatic Form; !Travel Form
I too would like some macro help! I wrote a feral charge ravage macro a while back, but found it wouldn’t work unless I had ravage on my hotbar somewhere else. I mainly want a good space saving macro for an endangered catbear. A single button that will stampeding roar for either form, skull bash either form, mangle either form, etc. Macroing in pounce to the opener and tf to the finisher sounds life good advice when I want to be lazy in a dungeon or solo, which is the only time I cat. My guild tells me I’m too good a healer to “waste” as dps or tank.