Cat weaving, and what it’s actually worth to a Balance druid

If you play a Balance druid, sooner or later someone in guild chat will tell you that you’re leaving damage on the table by not cat weaving, and if you’re new to the class you’ll have no way of knowing whether that’s real advice or someone repeating a word they heard on a stream. This post is my attempt to explain what cat weaving actually is, what it does for a Balance druid in particular, and where I think it earns its place on a Forever character, which is not everywhere people will tell you it is.

Whilst I’ve spent years on druids across both factions, learning each one by playing it rather than reading a guide, I’ll keep the same caveat I put on everything at the moment - Forever launches on the 4th of November, nobody has fought at level 60 on it yet, and that includes me. So treat the numbers below as pre-launch reasoning rather than tested fact, and expect me to come back and correct the ones the fights disagree with.

What cat weaving is

Essentially, cat weaving is stepping out of your caster game for a moment, shifting into Cat Form to throw some melee attacks, and then shifting back to carry on casting. The druid version of this is older than most of the people arguing about it, and it arrives in two flavours that get muddled together. There’s melee weaving, where you auto-attack in whatever form you’re in to trigger something, and there’s proper cat weaving, where you shift all the way into Cat Form for the stronger swings and the energy abilities that come with it.

The reason any caster would bother at all comes down to one ability. Omen of Clarity (the one that gives your melee swings a chance to make your next spell free) only rolls its dice when you actually connect in melee. Stand at maximum range chain-casting Wrath, and your proc chance is exactly zero. That’s the whole trick really - you can’t get the free spell from where a caster normally stands, so you walk into melee and take the swings that can hand it to you.

Why a caster would ever melee

In my opinion, and it is an opinion, the mana is the real prize here, not the melee damage. A Balance druid’s oldest problem is that casting flat-out empties the bar long before the fight is done, and at range there’s nothing you can do about that except drink or stop. Weaving turns it around, because every swing that procs Omen of Clarity is a Wrath you didn’t pay for, and strung together over a long fight that’s a real amount of casting you’d otherwise have gone without.

Put some rough numbers on it so you can argue with me. If a weave gets you a free spell roughly once every ten seconds you’re in melee, and a Wrath costs somewhere north of 250 mana, then two minutes spent weaving hands you back a dozen-odd free casts, call it 3,000 mana you simply didn’t have before. That isn’t a rotation, it’s a mana battery, and it’s the one honest reason a caster steps into the cleave. The person to read on the maths is the author of the Moonweaver addon, who has written the Classic version of all this out properly.

The other honest reason is movement. A caster who has to reposition is a caster doing nothing, and doing nothing is the most expensive thing in a fight. Shifting to cat whilst you move means you’re still landing swings, still rolling for Omen, still doing something on the way to where you need to be. Treat weaving as a way to spend time you were going to lose anyway, not as extra damage you bolt onto a rotation that was already full.

What the shift costs

None of this is free, and I think the people selling cat weaving as pure upside do newer players a disservice. Here’s what each weave actually costs you:

• The shift itself, costs mana every single time you change form, and whilst Natural Shapeshifter at 3/3 takes thirty percent off that, thirty percent off a cost you’re paying twice a window still adds up across a long fight.
• Two globals, go on the shift in and the shift out, a second and a half each that you’re not casting, so a window that’s too short loses you more casting than the free spell ever gives back.
• Your caster state, drops the moment you leave it, which on this class means no Moonkin aura whilst you’re a cat and nothing cast whilst you’re swinging, because Cat Form and spellcasting don’t share the same body.
• Melee range, is where all of it happens, and in a raid that’s the cleave, in PvP that’s inside the reach of whoever you were trying to kite (kiting being keeping your distance whilst you deal damage), which is a very different kind of expensive.

There’s also the part nobody likes to say plainly. You don’t get your mana back the way you’d hope whilst you’re swinging in cat, so the battery only pays off when the Omen procs and the chip damage together beat the regen and the casting you gave up to get them. On a dedicated caster with the gear for it, they often do. On other builds, they often don’t.

What it means for the 31/0/20

So what does all of this mean for my build, the 31/0/20 Balance and Restoration hybrid I keep going on about? Less than you’d hope, and I want to be straight with you about that. The build spends zero points in Feral, which means my Cat Form has none of the talents that make a cat hurt - no improved bleeds, no Feral attack power, no energy tricks - so the chip-damage branch above is close to nothing for me. If you cat weave on this build expecting a damage gain, you’ll be let down.

What the weave is for, on this build, is mana and movement, not damage. The Omen procs are worth the same to me as to anyone, a free Wrath is a free Wrath, and I’ll take one whenever I’m already in melee range or already on the move. What I won’t do is break a clean casting position to chase swings, because for a caster with no Feral investment the damage I’d add doesn’t come close to the casting I’d give up to add it.

If you’re weighing whether to weave on your own character, these are the honest questions to sit with. Do you have any points in Feral at all, or is your cat a wet paper bag like mine? Are you actually running dry in your longer fights, or do you finish most of them with mana to spare? Are you going to be in melee or moving anyway, or would weaving mean abandoning a position that was working? Answer those before you take anyone’s word that weaving is free value.

Duels and battlegrounds

PvP changes the sum again, and it changes it in both directions. In a duel every global and every step matters, and the moment you spend as a cat is a moment you can’t root, heal or reset, so I weave sparingly there, mostly to bank an Omen proc when a melee opponent has already closed the gap and I’m stuck in their face regardless. If they’re on me anyway, I may as well be swinging for a free Wrath whilst I wait for my opening.

In a battleground it’s the other way around. So much of a battleground is running between objectives, and all of that running is free weaving time - swings I take on the way to a flag cost me nothing I was using, and the Omen procs mean I turn up with more mana than the caster who jogged the same distance doing nothing. That’s the version of cat weaving I’ll actually lean on once Forever is live, not because it’s clever, but because it spends time I was losing anyway.

All of this to say, cat weaving isn’t the free damage it gets sold as, it’s a mana-and-movement tool that rewards the builds and the moments that suit it and punishes the ones that don’t. If you’ve read the above and your character has the Feral points, the mana problem and the melee moments to make it pay, then I wish you good weaving and a full bar. If it doesn’t, don’t let anyone shame you into juggling forms for a few points of chip damage you’ll never feel.

I’ll be testing every bit of this live once Restokins hits 60, weaving badly at first like everyone does, and I’d love to compare notes on where it actually earns its place. You’ll find me on the stream most weekdays from midday AEST, and the build it all hangs off is written up in the Restokin approach.