Primal Tenacity vs. Nurturing Instinct
Someone asked on our guild forums what I though about these two talents in a one or the other context, saying he hasn’t found much serious discussion of them. I did a quick search of my own on EJ and at Emmerald’s and I couldn’t find much about them either. So this is purely my opinion incoming.
Primal Tenacity is a talent near the top of the Feral tree that increases your chance to resist Stun and Fear mechanics by 5/10/15%. How useful is that? It can be very useful. As a tank, the fear and stun resist allows you to continue building threat on the target, and maintain positioning. As DPS, resisting those effects allows you to continue DPSing if those effects are resisted.
The problem with this talent is two-fold: one, it’s only a chance to resist. Meaning it could NEVER EVER happen and still be working as intended. The RNG is not your friend (or, at least, is not MY friend, freakin’ T4 helm). Two, prior to 2.4.?, whichever patch it was, when they changed fear and aggro, this would have been mandatory for tanking. It was a 15% chance to not wipe a party/raid on a bad fear because the mobs switched from feared targets to non-feared targets. Many classes had to actively avoid fear resisting talents so that if the tank got feared, everyone did. Since that is no longer the case, fear effects can be bad for positioning fights, but are not so critical any longer. It also does not do anything against horror effects and some stuns cannot be resisted (think Maiden’s Repentance ability).
Why would you want this talent? Well, there are two aspects to dealing damage or generating threat. You have to use your abilities in the most effective way (DPS) for the most time (time on target). PT can increase the second one. For tanking, it is a small aid in those positioning fights like Nightbane. PvP is an arena more likely to utilize this talent. Aside from warlock’s Death Coil, there are no other horrify abilities (maybe Drums of Panic?), most are regular fear and stun effects. Since there are many more PvP encounters that are going to subject you to those, the 15% has more chances to occur.
Nurturing Instinct, in its current form, is not a bad talent for the form switching druid. Right at the front, these talent points are wasted for tanking-focused builds, put them somewhere more useful. NI has two uses: 1-Increase your healing spells by 50/100% of your agility; 2- Increase healing done to you in Cat form by 10/20%. Obviously, the first is only useful when not in a form, meaning tanking druids won’t have many occasions to use this. The second is only for Cat form, so no Bear love on that (though, if it did affect Bear, this would be a mandatory tanking talent).
While I have less than stellar DPS gear, I have a little over 450 Agility unbuffed, which would mean a buff of 450 +healing if I switched to do that in combat. That would net me additional healing in the following amounts:
| Spell | Coefficient | Bonus Healed |
| Healing Touch | 1 | 450 |
| LifeBloom (HoT) | ~.34 | 153 (total) |
| LifeBloom (Bloom) | ~.51 | 223 |
| Rejuvenation | .8 | 360 |
| Regrowth (HoT) | ~.7 | 315 |
| Regrowth (Direct) | ~.3 | 135 |
Druids having more Agility focused gear would net more benefit than I would.
The second part, increasing healing done to you by 20% is a little more complicated. Using numbers from our recent Lurker kill, here’s the benefit you would expect to see:
| Spell | Original | Buffed |
| Regrowth (Direct) | 2124 | 2548 |
| Regrowth (per tick) | 425 | 510 |
| Chain Heal (average) | 2287 | 2744 |
| Flash of Light | 1459 | 1750 |
| Flash Heal | 2213 | 2655 |
| Renew (per tick) | 762 | 918 |
| Prayer of Mending | 1717 | 2060 |
These are not inconsiderable benefits, if you would use them. For PvP, this is a very good talent. Either because you are switching forms to cast heals or because you are receiving them.
For raids it’s more debatable.
When putting together raid groups, it is important to plan healing requirements for the damage being done in the encounter. If the encounter is going to have considerable amounts of raid damage, part of the plan should be to have healers capable of handling that portion of the damage. So, how useful is the additional 250-500 health that this talent gives you if there is raid damage? Without knowing exactly how much damage you’d be taking, it’s hard to say. For this talent to be optimal, you’d have to be in cat form taking raid damage where the amount of damage is ~400 damage over the unbuffed healing values so that it only requires one, rather than two heals. If the healer would have to throw a second heal anyway, this talent is less useful. It would fill your health bar faster, but not enough to prevent that second heal.
What does all this come down to? For PvE there is slight benefit to either, and if your talent spec allows it, neither talent is bad for a DPS spec. For tanking specs, PT is nice, but NI is a waste of points. For PvPing feral druids, both have a lot of usefulness. Neither is a talent that is going to make or break a spec. Neither is going to substantially increase DPS, TPS, or mitigation. I would suggest, before taking either of these, you look at your spec and see if talents providing more benefit are being skipped. If you have some points leftover, or if you really enjoy PvP, either of these could be nice for you.
In interest of disclosure, I’ve never had NI in my spec, and I recently specced out of PT. It was rare that PT resisted a fear or stun in PvE or PvP, but that may just have been luck. I have not found its absence detrimental thus far.
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