Feral Druid Adjustments Coming Soon - April 3rd 2023

Greetings,

Within the next 24 hrs we will be making an adjustment via hotfix that will cause Omen of Clarity to always trigger when Faerie Fire (Feral) is used on non-player, non-pet targets. At the same time, Omen of Clarity will no longer proc from Gift of the Wild. This change is intended to smooth out Feral DPS gameplay for most players and resolve many of the social and gameplay challenges that were created by the so-called “Bearweaving” combat strategy. In many situations, Bearweaving not only increases the mechanical complexity of the class to a degree far above what was intended in original Wrath of the Lich King it also places a strain on the raid to keep up with the Druid’s added threat generation, with said impact continually increasing as the Druid becomes more adept at optimizing the rotation.

When crafting this change, it was a goal to ensure we did not “nerf” or decrease the effectiveness of the Feral DPS spec in PvE at all. It was also a goal to not increase the effectiveness of Feral in PvP, where the spec is already strong. Our final goal was to raise the relative skill “floor” for the class without too greatly increasing the output of Druids’ playing at the very highest levels before this adjustment. With this adjustment we expect that the best Feral DPS players in the world may expect somewhere between a 5% and 10% damage increase depending on the encounter while no longer requiring shifting into bear form to optimize output and will provide an even larger percentage increase in the damage output of those players who were not employing the Bearweaving rotation prior to this change.

As always, we are hesitant to make major adjustments to the basic playstyle of many classes, but we feel that this is necessary to bring the gameplay of Feral Druids much closer to the intent from the original Wrath of the Lich King and make the spec slightly more intuitive and approachable to the majority of players.

We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve received since launch on this and many other topics. Thank you!

53 Likes

fix infernal

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Warrior next ?
Allow rend in berserker stance to “raise the skill floor” or fix munching maybe? Your pick really

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I really enjoy that people will still find a way to be upset at Blizzard about this :slight_smile:

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Inb4 rdruids flock to this thread to ask what about them.

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So flower weaving is gone, won’t miss going through dozens of spineleaf every night.

Bear weaving still stays a thing though to a lesser degree i’m geussing.

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Thanks Blizzard, this will be a decent buff to restocat, we take what we can get but we could use a little buff to our healing output next!

I don’t think anyone is gonna be mad about this. Alot are just mad cause they get nerfs because certain things weren’t intended. on the other hand things that should be working are bugged because of the cataclysm client are just not fixed (like munching)

‘x’ class gets a change but what about my class that is doing perfectly fine right now?

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Happy cat is happy

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Wild growth is still garbage

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Oh snap and it seems to be live now.

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Swapping stance to press rend is not hard and making it available in berserker stance will barely be a buff at all :joy:

exactly, “smoothing” out the rotation whilst bearly increasing dps, just like ret and feral… right…?

Didn’t ret get a 1k dps increase?

Posting for once in support of, and to show praise for this change. I did not expect a quality of life change to Feral and certainly not of this cali-purr AT ALL. Cat feels legitimately good with this on LIVE right meow.

MAKE FERAL GREAT AGAIN! YEAH!

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Quick shoutout to all the #SomeChanges people that demanded no dungeon finder! You opened the floodgates and now you get to swim :slight_smile:

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Whilst I agree that feral probably needed a buff, both druids and paladins are both extremely sought after classes in raids, meanwhile warriors are lucky if 2 of them are bought along to a raid, regardless of spec, and the best warrior spec is basically on par with these “poorly” performing specs, that both bring raid saving utility (brez, innervate, dsac, bop). Most raids would probably prefer only bring along one warrior.

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warrior’s still cant properly benefit from the spell que window to mitigate latency because heroic strike, maul, and rune strike break the spell que window feature

but you change this? lmao

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