Classic Feral Druid Melee DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Druids.

Unlike lots of other specs and classes, the Feral talent build is quite rigid. There is not much wiggle room for personal preference with any point, since every talent taken has a purpose. You need the 31 points in Feral to get Leader of the Pack for the 3% critical strike chance buff for your group. This is not optional, since it is an important buff for other melee DPS as well. Furor is critical to your damage because of the strength of power shifting, where you shift in and out of Cat Form whenever you are out of Energy to instantly generate Energy from the talent. This means you are also locked in to those 5 points in Restoration, and 11 of your last 14 points are locked into Balance. This is because Omen of Clarity is extremely powerful due to the free Shreds you will get from the procs. This leaves you with only 3 points leftover and Natural Shapeshifter is the best choice. In shorter fights, or if you do not power shift, Natural Shapeshifter is useless, but that should not normally be the case. Power shifting is a critical part of dealing damage as Feral, and Natural Shapeshifter lowers the Mana cost by 30%, thus increasing the number of times you will be able to power shift during boss fights. None of the other available talents that you can choose in any of the three trees provide any sort of damage gain.

Once of Feral's strengths is that it is the only spec in the game that has two intended builds built into a single talent tree. This talent build makes use of that to pick up most of the important talents needed to DPS and to tank, while only making minor sacrifices in each spec. This enables you to swap between DPS and tanking anytime, making you a great choice for potentially off-tanking during a raid. Even mid-fight, you can instantly swap between DPS and tanking whenever needed.

Unlike the pure DPS build, this build has lots of wiggle room. Most of the choices come down to whether you want to focus more on DPS or tanking. In the first couple of tiers for the Feral tree, you can move points between Feral Instinct, Thick Hide, and Feral Aggression, depending on whether you want more threat, armor, or Ferocious Bite damage. In general, it is advisable to always lean towards taking talents that help you tank over talents that help you do more damage if you are not confident, since losing aggro or dying as a tank can easily be a raid wipe, whereas doing slightly less damage will not cause you to fail an encounter in most cases. You will notice also that this build loses Natural Shapeshifter, Feral Charge, Feline Swiftness, and Faerie Fire (Feral) to do more threat and get more armor. You can choose potentially to drop Primal Fury if you think you have plenty of Rage generation in Dire Bear Form, but until you have tested it yourself, you should keep it.