Leveling FeralFollow

I use a mixture, depending on the mobs and my mood at the time.

Going bear and proxy pulling one, then FFF another then charge a 3rd then back up into other mobs while swiping is a good way to quickly pick up 4-5 mobs at a time and can be nice and quick.

I was smacking around rhinos in large groups yesterday...fun in a competetive zone to gather 5-6 beasties and slowly chew them down...and then skin them all.

The things about bears now is that we've got the talent that gives us +5 Rage when we crit and the talent that gives us +3 Rage when we dodge. With a 40-50% dodge rate (which is what most pre-WotLK bears would have been sporting in decent gear) and enough targets I was effectively generating Rage way, way faster than I could use it (there's no limit to the +5 Rage from crits...5 crits from a single swipe in a large pack is +25 Rage).

If you can stay alive through it, it's fair game. Just keep in mind that swipe-spamming mobs to death is slow...very slow...almost painfully slow. Even 2 target Maul + Swipe spam is slow...very slow...almost painfully slow.

My pally can kill large groups faster and she hasn't got anywhere near the gear of my druid.

It should, if it does damage now; it never used to cause it never did damage.

I've been out of practice using it to tag/pull though, on account of that very reason, so I haven't noticed since 3.x.

Edit: Aurelius, I've actually had better luck in groups spamming Mangle+Maul with the Maul glyph; individual mobs die faster and it generally seems to kill the group faster overall. Never really have rage troubles either, on account of those wonderful +3/+5 bonuses for dodge/crit you mentioned.

Edited, Nov 16th 2008 3:18am by Norellicus

I've played around a little with aoe killing in bear form but it didn't seem to be comparable unless I had alot of mobs. Since most of the quests and their related areas don't lend themselves well to mass slaughter, I've been prefering cat for grinding. If I end up with a larger pull I'll go bear and either swipe it up or hit berserk and chew them apart (berserk + x2 maul glyph is quite devestating), but for the most part cat seems to be ideal for most general grinding.

From an levelling speed point of view: pre-70 (and maybe post-70 too, I do not know yet) questing is by far the fastest way of levelling. So as long as you finish your quests faster while using AoE bear (which I doubt), bear is the way to go.

I use a mix depending on situation (and to keep things interesting), but my "base" form is cat.

((although there is SO much fun in swiping a good bunch of enemies and see the numbers flying... ooh the old times as a paladin with full screens of numbers flying <Force Reactive Disk included>))