Patch 4.0.1

Patch 4.0.1 has been upon us for some weeks, but there is a huge difference that this patch has bought. New talent trees, less points to spend, changing the levels of when you gain some key skills and just turning a lot of things upside down.
I'm going to take you over some of the changes after the jump, so keep reading on!



Patch 4 has bought many new toys to play with:

• New talent trees
• New skills
• Reforging
• Mastery
• Various other gameplay elements

The Talent Trees

I don't think that these have changed to much from what they previously were. They have definitely been improved, with the old boring percentage talents taken out, making way for more, new and innovative talents to take their place.

Blizzard now also EXPLAINS how each spec works, and you gain some bonus abilities (our one being Vengeance, of course!)

The basic talents are still simple, and the same as pre patch, in a way that we still take:

• Armor increasing talents
• Shape shifting cost reduce
• Health increases (although that is from the resto tree, more on this later)
• Skills like Feral charge, and Berserk.

You will also noticed that they removed things like "Improved X Talent". Why? Because its boring.

The New Skills

A change, that many of us may welcome, although some others may not is the fact that lacerate now only stacks 3 times, down from the old 5 times. 

This relieves the monotonous spam that was stacking lacerate 5 times, but now leaves our rotation feeling a little bit empty.

Swipe has also been affected. It now has a cooldown, but to compensate, the damage multipliers have been changed. This now makes it more like Thunderclap.

Pulverize is one of the new skills that has been added to the arsenal. It consumes your stacks of lacerates to create damage equal to a percentage of your attack power, and that percentage changes depending how many stacks you Pulverize.

It also provides a crit bonus, 4% crit for each stack of lacerate you consume.

Our level 81 skill, Thrash, should provide us with a bit more of an easier time when it comes to dealing with AoE encounters now that Swipe has a small cooldown.

Our talent that helps us to mitigate damage, Primal Fury, has seen the nerf bat, and now only reduces the next hit by 35% of your attack power, down from 65%. This is because the Vengeance mechanic allowed main tank druids to stack attack power insanely high and absorb upwards of 14k on bosses in Ice crown.

It was also evident in the Cataclysm Beta that druids were in too good a place, as 90% of the 25 man guilds streaming had Feral main tanks.

They also nerfed the resto talent that buffs our Stamina, Heart of the wild. It now only increases total stamina by 10%. This is to bring us in line with the HP pools of other tanks.

Reforging

All of that haste you have staring at you bluntly in the face. Laugh at it, as you reforge it into crit, or mastery.

A reforger resides where all enchanters are, and for a fee (depending on the iLevel) you can change the secondary stats (crit, haste, spirit (bears obviously have never seen this!) and soon to be, mastery).

Mastery

Mastery is one of those new stats that they are bringing into cataclysm.

It is like a percentage modifier, similar to what some of our talents used to look like.

Our specific mastery increases absorption done by Primal Fury. This means that the "nerf" blizzard has hit it with, can be overcome when mastery starts to appear on gear.

Feral DPS can increase their bleed ticks, if your interested.

HP pools across the board have been increased, so if your sitting around 60k HP self buffed in form post patch, consider regemming for some agility to provide some more threat and dodge.