The newly revamped Shadowmeld is an incredibly useful talent for Alliance feral druids. It's basically like giving every Night Elf Feign Death with a stealth component added in. I feel bad for our beefy brothers. What's it good for?
- Dumping aggro when you're DPSing. Shadowmeld is a 100% threat wipe against all mobs. If you string a bunch of kitty crits early in a pull or are in a fight with weird aggro mechanics like Malygos or Noth, it's a big help to be able to start over at 0 threat.
- Handing aggro to another tank. I'm using Shadowmeld a fair amount when tanking. It's useful on fights where you have to hand-off aggro to another tank, like on Gluth. Sure the tank can just taunt off you, but if the taunt misses or they're not paying attention you can just hand the other tank aggro. I also shadowmeld trash on to my fellow tanks when I'm done bear AoEing and want to go kitty. You want to be very sure that another tank is #2 on aggro before you do it and don't shadowmeld a lot of damage onto another tank if your healers aren't ready to switch.
- Avoiding crap you don't want to fight. Pick up a train of mobs as you ride through the countryside? Just shadowmeld when you stop and they all go away.
- Harassing people. It's rude, but sometimes it's amusing to train a mob to someone and shadowmeld. Mostly the mob will just turn around and ignore people (Blizzard has anti-griefing code). But sometimes it works. Why, just today I brought a dragon up into the Naxx summoning area, got it to breathe on a bunch of people, then melded away. Petty, but a little amusing.
- Changing gear. Shadowmeld drops you out of combat and lets you change clothes. It seems like Outfitter or the like can swap your entire outfit the moment you press Shadowmeld. I haven't tried this extensively but it seems to work.
- Cheap battle rez. You can Shadowmeld to get out of combat and start casting Revive. The 10 second cast time makes this not terribly useful, but sometimes I do it to get a jump start on rezzing someone who died on trash.
- Wipe recovery. If the raid is about to wipe it occasionally works to Shadowmeld in a quiet corner, let the boss reset, then rez people.
- Flying. Resto4life had a blog post just after I wrote this one that reminded me: you can use Shadowmeld to take you out of combat so you can then shift to flight form. Particularly useful in world PvP and as a way to escape a thicket of mobs.
The one wrinkle is some of these actions require you stay out of combat for awhile. Shadowmelding in a raid drops you out of combat, but you're often brought right back into combat a moment later. Either ambient damage hits you or (I think) you get pulled into combat just for standing too close to a hostile mob. You can still reset a boss if you're in combat, I think what matters is if you're on the boss' aggro table. But it's rare you'll be able to cast Revive without being interrupted.
Anyone have another creative use for Shadowmeld?