Auto-switching weapons

The fun thing about being a druid is you can do more than one thing with a single spec. Feral druids are able to tank or DPS quite well and can even heal in a pinch. The game is most fun for me when I get to do more than one thing during a single fight. For instance, it's quite common that I'll tank one mob in a complicated pull and then switch to DPS. For those situations, switching gear in combat is a big help to optimize for whatever you're doing at the moment.

You can't change your whole outfit when in combat, but you can change the weapons you're holding. Personally I'm too busy when fighting to be fiddling with equipping weapons, so I rely on an addon to change my gear for me automatically. I use the Outfitter 4.1 addon; ClosetGnome fans can use ClosetGnome_Switcher.

The setup is simple. Create a new empty Outfitter outfit for and assign it the Automation Druid: Cat Form. Leave the outfit empty except for your favored DPS weapon. Then create a second outfit for bear form, again empty except for your tank weapon. That's it! Now when you shift to bear form you'll have the tank weapon, and when you shift to cat form you'll have the DPS weapon. Easy.

Is it worth the trouble? Absolutely. If you're in tank gear and shift to cat, swapping in the Stranglestaff for Earthwarden is good for 300 kitty points or about 45 DPS. Even better if you're in cat gear and need to go bear for an emergency, you automatically pick up all the extra armor and defense from your tanking weapon without having to think about it.

You might be tempted to put your entire cat and bear outfits into the magic autoswitching slots. I'd advise against this though. One drawback of changing gear is it changes your total stamina and therefore, your hit points. When I autoswitched my whole outfit I'd find myself in the situation where I was supposed to be tanking but was in my full cat outfit. When I shifted to bear for the pull I was suddenly at 75% health. So I find it better to have my main bear and cat gear in non-automatic outfits and manually choose between them before a pull and just let my weapon auto-swap.

One advanced trick is to put a healing weapon in your main outfit and only equip a feral weapon when you shift forms. That way when you're in caster form you have some +heal. For my Lifeblooms it's the difference between 39/tick and 78/tick,  a nice boost for emergency heals. I don't do the healer trick in my bear gear though, again to avoid starting a pull at less than 100% life.

There's a cost to switching your gear; it triggers a 1.5 second global cooldown. In theory you can hide this cost inside the GCD that's triggered by shifting into bear or cat form; you can still equip during GCD, for some odd reason. Unfortunately Outfitter seems to have some delays in it so that you end up taking two 1.5 second GCDs. Not ideal, but not the end of the world if you're only shifting at non-crucial moments. This extra GCD may be fixable in Outfitter, or you could avoid it with some other means of changing gear when changing forms.

One final point; all the weapon shifting is counterproductive in PvP if you want to stick with a single PvP weapon. In that case, configure the automation settings to not equip in battlegrounds.

Comments

[Lin [EG]]

How would this affect Powershifting, if at all?

[Nelson]

If you're powershifting, you probably don't want to be swapping weapons between cat form and caster form. The /cancelform doesn't invoke a GCD, but the weapon swap would create one. It's possible if you shift back into cat form quickly enough that Outfitter won't even try to equip your caster weapon, but I haven't tested it.

[Trimble Epic]

I'm pretty sure the global cooldown caused by weapon switch is only 1.0 seconds.

However, the GCD from shifting into form doesn't seem to affect form abilities. I.E. prowl immediately after going into cat, or charge immediately after going into bear. You only have to wait for LAG, not GCD. On my machine, that's about 200ms.

I toyed around with letting outfitter adjust my weapon (and idol) when switching, but I found it getting in the way of insta-charge.

[Grumpy]

I've tried the autoswitch of gear over time, and found that I ended up turning it off and on depending on the situation. I had healing gear for caster form, the whole 9-yards. For example, I have gone into fights in Cat to do DPS, and the tank goes down. Switch to bear and start tanking with a LOT less armor, and no crit immunity. Tanking doesn't go as well this way, so I would end up with my tank gear on and even tho dps goes down, we kill the mobs/boss. And the I had to get specific sets for PVP which won't auto-set. I now manually switch, but use the add-on so I don't have to run several macros or manually switch pieces. The above post about powershifting gives another reason for not auto-switching.

Just one bear's opinion.

[A Druid]

Rather than an addon I just use a macro

/cancelform [stance:5]
/cast !Dire Bear Form
/equip Wildfury Greatstaff

and there is a similar one for cat form.