Feedback: Wildstalker in The War Within

Classes Druid
14

This talent tree looks like it took inspiration from Balance/Feral play instead of Resto/Feral in the form of Hunt Beneath the Open Skies talent.

Adding something like Thriving Growth to AoE spells sounds like it is going to be strong and focus on casting AoE getting a massive amount of Symbiotic Blooms on the entire group. Not sure if there is a lower chance to proc for AoE spells versus ST, if not it doesn’t make sense but okay.

Symbiotic Blooms almost sound like it going to replace Adaptive Swarm.

2 Likes
15

I used to main feral and still keep up with it in the hopes that it will become a spec I can enjoy again.

Yeah…Wildstalker isn’t doing that for me. This tree looks incredibly boring. It’s really just a bunch of passives that I would never notice while playing feral. Even worse, it expects you to pick up talents that are already nearly impossible to pick up for feral, such as Ursol’s Vortex, Wild Growth, and Rejuvenation. In pvp at least, almost no one is playing those talents because the druid class tree is far too restrictive. I can’t imagine it is much different on the pve side of things. Feral struggles so much defensively in pvp and none of this really helps because a good amount of these passives are buffs to healing spells ferals can’t even take.

You could give me Wildstalker right now on my druid alt and I wouldn’t even notice the difference for either feral or resto except some slightly bigger numbers. That really doesn’t make me very excited to play my druid when compared to other hero talent trees that introduce meaningful gameplay choices and new utility.

I hope Druid of the Claw is better than this, or this tree gets reworked, otherwise it will likely be yet another expansion of not playing my feral druid. And on that note, please fix the druid class tree. First to get worked on for DF and the absolute last to get touched. Tragic.

7 Likes
16

For resto the core points looks to be a new version of the germination luxuriant soil combo, just with more than just rejuv as the trigger, looks like it’ll work well in raid compared to the smaller group focus of keeper so i’m relatively happy with it.

Feedback for the nodes

  • entangling vortex/ flower walk node; For feral this is a pure utility choice. For resto, depending on tuning i could see this being a utility vs through-put choice and could promote popping barkskin as a rotational ability, but again thats all down to tuning.

  • Resilent flourishing; has a secondary affect for feral that doesnt affect resto, i think something simple like symbiotic bloom jumping if the target it heals is full health would be a good equivalent

  • vigorous creeper; is this just mastery again or does it function as mastery for the blooms. The prior would be prefered but if blooms work like treants where theyre only one way for mastery and this is meant to fix them i’d prefer they just function as a full hot baseline and this node be reworked.

  • beneath the open skys; I get the idea is passive healing while in kitty form for our already rolling hots but its completely wasted if you don’t like being in catform as resto; which yah its the tree shared with feral but keeper doesn’t require we be in boomy form for its bonuses. Think it should be reworked or moved to a choice node.

  • strategic infusion; pre-legion mastery but crit instead of flat healing, short form maintenance buffs are boring and tedious up it to like 10 seconds.

Other than that, i got nothing, its so simple but effective that i feel like i’ll set it and forget it while continuing to play like normal, and i like that as an option compared to how reliant keeper is on treants uptime.

1 Like
18

Extremely boring as many people above have said. I think it’s quite disappointing, especially combined with the flavor text right above the talents. The flavor text sounds so awesome and yet the tree is full of complete passives.

Wildstalkers are druids who feel such an affinity for the remote wilds of the world that they live amongst them, mostly in cat form, hunting to perpetuate the cycle of life and death and destroy those who would despoil nature. They use their healing powers to restore life to barren spaces and the creatures who live there.

This is exactly what I’ve always imagined as being the best of playing druid, specifically feral, and this tree does none of that.

I think that not touching Adaptive Swarm in any way at all misses a huge opportunity on what this tree could be capable of, cautiously. As long as the tree does not generate new/free swarms, it could be extremely fun. New/free swarms however would quickly diminish the actual fun of playing Adaptive Swarm.

Feral basically doesn’t interact with the Symbiotic Bloom in any shape or form, for several reasons. For one, taking the abilities that proc it from the Class Tree is near impossible with the massive amount of required talent points for just your basic damage and “required” utility (if you’re not taking Innervate in raid you may as well not have a raid spot). This is also compounded by the fact that if you wanted to take, say, Wild Growth, and cast it for some blooms (to maybe proc), you spending 1.2 seconds to cast Wild Growth and then an additional GCD to return to cat and start doing your real rotation again. Just feels like something is missing here. What is the last sentence of the Wildstalker flavor text supposed to imply? Is the Wildstalker doing healing from cat form? Should we expect that from the Wildstalker hero tree? (Healing in cat form has left a sour taste in my mouth, with the recent change of “autounshift” marcos breaking, I will be honest.)

The vines are boring. Even if they are very cool visually on enemies I think the effect is boring and it has zero impact on gameplay beyond some free passive damage and an increase to Taste for Blood, which is also passive. Longer Rake is actually not that great for Feral gameplay as it interferes heavily with proccing Bloodtalons.

At the very least this tree isn’t encouraging a poor rotation/gameplay, it just changes nothing about what you were already doing. I also think, just looking at it, it looks quite weak for Resto druids in particular, when looking at how overloaded Grove Guardians is as a spell baseline on top of all of the things that Keeper of the Grove does to them.

12 Likes
19

This. When I initially read the text, it felt like it was hinted at being able to cast these listed spells (Wild Growth, Efflo, and Regrowth) in cat form, but I think some clarifying could be done here.

If this is the case, color me intrigued.

1 Like
20

The text of the Wildstalker Thriving Growth talent is being updated to reflect the latest version of its design.

It should read " Wild Growth, Regrowth, and Efflorescence have a chance to cause Symbiotic Blooms to grow on the target…" not Rejuvenation.

7 Likes
21

There isn’t much to say, it’s incredibly boring.

Just because you wanna make hero talents mostly passives, doesn’t mean you have to do it like this.

Take a look at frostfire for what you should do.

This batch of hero talents overall has been more miss than hit.

4 Likes
22

Thanks for the quick communication and update, we really do appreciate you guys talking to us early instead of later on.

Any thoughts on helping Feral access more than just Regrowth easily to take further advantage of the healing sides to Wildstalker, such as maybe allowing Predatory Swiftness to be spent on Wild Growth?

5 Likes
23

This makes it much worse for resto tbh, rejuv keeps getting pushed away when its our staple spell in favor of regrowth which was always our spam filler, was nice to see a tree actually promote rejuv again.

4 Likes
24

Thanks for the quick iteration. It is much appreciated. That change alone makes this tree more interesting for Feral.

However, as stated above, there is a huge opportunity to make this tree much more interesting overall by not just adding an Adaptive Swarm-esque ability in the Vines and Blooms, but actually making this tree build on Adaptive Swarm and the gameplay that many of us already enjoy.

And still, with Feral essentially unable to access many of the Restoration-based talents in the Class Tree due to its disproportionately restricting design as compared to other classes, it is a little difficult to get fully excited for a Feral-Resto crossover tree, so if there’s any insight you or anyone can give on how or when our Class Tree will be iterated on, it’d be much appreciated.

4 Likes
25

But tying it to Regrowth actually means Feral gets to play with Blooms.

26

As many others have noted, quite boring really.

But as the same time, Feral is doted as one of the busier “plate balancing” specs. While i was hoping for more personal interaction and choices, could the spec really handle juggling more?

Id be either way. Just a little annoying seeing it all be passive and forgettable

27

I really like what I’m seeing so far, at least from the feral side. What we don’t need, is further rotational complexity - at least that’s my opinion.

2 Likes
28

They did take away Savage Roar some time ago, so that’s one less plate to spin in retail at least.

29

Honestly they’ve made Feral too simple. Too much energy means energy management no longer matters. Tiger’s Fury has near infinite uptime so snapshotting barely matters. The spec doesn’t feel like a management spec anymore. I wouldn’t mind if the Feral tree gets reworked just to get some of that identity back.

30

I guess but then shred or bite need to trigger bloodseeker so resto has a way to proc vines without putting a point in the feral line to keep it even.

And rejuv needs some love in one of these 2 trees besides just the 10% option in keeper, this is a good place to put it.

31

regardless of tree being good or not, my fear of playing M+ next expansion, the ‘survivability’ issue in both pve and pvp (if it still persists), the sole reason people will take this talent tree over feral/(whatever i forgot) is because of harmonious constitution.

I really dont wanna see that.

1 Like
32

I think Rake being a baseline ability alongside or over Shred makes more sense in this case.

33

Feral’s complexity is largely diminished from prior expansions, honestly. If you were to tie in something with Adaptive Swarm, I don’t think it would increase complexity by that much, unless the player wanted to deep dive into how to properly manage your swarms to maximize the number of them. Which can generally be gleaned from actual gameplay and paying attention to what the swarms are doing. Although managing colonies is mostly an Unbridled Swarm thing, not Adaptive Swarm thing.

5 Likes
34

I would only be in favor of this if feral got a damage boost commiserate with the added difficulty of the rotation. As it is right now, it’s way more effort than paladin, warrior, BM hunter, for nowhere near enough payoff.

8 Likes