I actually wanted a feral in my group the last few weeks. We had ProtWar, MistMonk, BMHunt, RetPal. Wanted a Feral to benefit from physical buff stack while bringing a second BR and Druid buff. Sadly there were none and I wasn’t willing to wait for a long time.
Sadly given the reveals of the 3/4 Druid trees already I have little reason to believe that this last spec will be as exciting as say frostfire is for mages.
It feels like (at least to me) we have to continue to pay the hybrid tax as these new talents have to acknowledge that we cannot recieve too many more active skills in fear of button bloat yet are also afraid to really push the boundaries as far as passive skills go in order to try to make up for it.
So far the only talent that got me excited across the 3 currently revealed hero talents is the one to change Thrash’s damage to arcane as I can make further use of Elune’s Favor to increase passive self-healing.
Really hoping that Druid of the Claw will be both interesting and impactful so I actually have something to think about which tree to main rather than being defaulted to one I ‘bearly’ care about. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one. ^^;)
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Honestly my biggest wish for the upcoming xpac is that they make more generic buffs and allow comp stacking that isn’t as supported as it is right now.
Imagine if they changed Battle Shout and Arcane Int to both just be 5% more main stat. Now Warriors could buff Augs, making a physical damage group able to benefit better from Aug.
Then imagine if they changed AOE target caps to be universal between classes, so that there aren’t weird outliers.
Those changes, with changes to some classes utility, CC, survivability (all that hero talents look to be making minor changes to), could result in interesting new comps.
I’d love to see a comp that is:
Monk-Warrior-Druid-Hunter-Aug, where any of the first 3 could tank, or Monk or Druid could heal. Would be a really cool thing for that to be a top viable comp.
Personally, I still think they should make other support specs to expand comp possibilities, but that seems like it might take awhile.
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Cat will probably get an extra charge on Survival Instincts, Bramble/Thorns, Ironfur, and Pulverize. Bear will get prowl, Primal Wrath, and combo points to spend on finishing moves.
Why are they ignoring the Feral/Balance combo?
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There was a Beast Mastery talent that does just this, it was called Lynx Rush. It made your pet jump to 5 different targets applying a bleed effect each time.
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I don’t think feral should be thrown away.
But it does need a massive overhaul and damage boosts. In a game filled with classes that pump massive raw damage. Feral is the only class that has to build up a bunch to do even mediocre damage.
Over the last few expansions it’s gotten worse. The higher level you get the longer it takes to kill a single enemy in pve. And that’s not fun for me personally. Ferals have definitely fallen from grace since I started playing ages ago.
I’d love to see them get some love again.
And yes I main feral.
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Affliction would like to have a word with you.
But this is what the Feral community wants. They want the bleed focused spec. Thats DoTs. Ramp time. In order to have the damage output to be competitive through just our bleeds would make us a ST power house in raids/pvp and we’d turn around and get nerfed.
The other side of that coin is to buff our direct damage side of the profile. But when that happens, community cries that they dont like a “bite-centric” playstyle.
Could we use a little tuning, sure absolutely. But if we want to focus on bleeds, we’ll never get rid of the ramp up issue. And if we cant get rid of the ramp up issue, we’ll never truly be able to compete against classes who’s damage is delivered on the button press.
I honestly cannot think of a solution that doesnt just create another problem elsewhere for us.
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Instead of a ramp up. Our dots should do great damage but allow us to put out our most powerful abilities. The problem is our damage is all dot focused but our dots do nothing. Even with 5-6 dots on an enemy their healthbar barely moves unless you use bite.
Which really shows in pvp. I’ll have a death knight or warlock put two dots on me and they’ll do crazy damage but my 6 dots on them barely move their healthbar.
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this is why i think its time to start fresh. what ever devs do work on this spec obviously dont understand it or try to make it good. its not fun to do half the damage for 2x the effort
my affliction warlock is under geared so it only feels like ramp up but at least with seed of corruption i get to see some nice numbers when it explodes
In PvP, I felt Feral’s damage profile was the best in Shadowlands, especially when playing Necro because you really could see the health bars rotting down with Adaptive Swarm and all your big bleeds up—though I was not a fan of the Draught of Deep Focus (increased dots/hots if they’re on a single target) and I’m glad that continues to be left in the Shadowlands because I felt it was too restrictive for tuning purposes; our bleeds couldn’t be buffed for aoe because then they’d be ridiculously OP with Draught.
The damage profile is skewed now because of Wild Attunement, but if we took Wild Attunement out of the mix and buffed our bleeds and Adaptive Swarm, I think I’d be perfectly happy with where Feral’s damage is. I understand the issues for PvE, but can’t really comment on them as I haven’t seriously PvEd for a long while now. But if our bleeds were buffed and Adaptive Swarm (and Unbridled Swarm) were viable in addition to a separate Bite-based Saber Jaws build, I think that would be a great balance in terms of our damage profiles. The issue—again for PvP—is survivability.
I’m worried, as I’ve said before, that Blizz will try to address this through the Hero Trees. We can see that already with the Wildstalker Hero Tree where we got “Adaptive Swarm Lite” in the Vines and Blooms. And I’m worried that we’re going to get the other half—survivability buffs—in this tree.
If the Druid Class Tree gets addressed, if some of the wasted nodes get folded together, if some of the 2-point nodes (and the only 3-point node in any of the class trees) get reduced and we finally get some flexibility to take some defensive options or some mobility—or some of the healing options like Protector of the Pack and Forestwalk if we’re going Wildstalker—then I would be much less concerned.
But as it stands now, I’m worried.
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Already covered that. You cant buff the DoTs to do that much damage without merriting a well deserved nerf right behind it.
They do. You just expect all the damage to be done in the first 4-5 seconds. But thats not how it works. The only reason you think the hp bar moves with Bite is because it happens instantly.
Eh, wrong. Corruption and Agony are on par with Rake and Rip (R&R may actually come out ahead). You picked probably 2 of the tankiest specs to compare against.
To be fair, Feral has been improving per expansion. Introduction of Primal Wrath in BFA, the leggos + Convoke + Conduits (which became baked into the spec in DF) in SL, and then S1 of Feral was fairly good. Sure it was held up by tier set, but other specs were too. Its trending upwards.
And wheres this 2x effort coming from? Aside from.maybe BM, theres really no more effort put forth than any other spec. Enhancement Shaman is just as much effort prioritizing procs and spreading FS and lining up Primordial with Wolves. And DH is the same. Waiting to line up abilities for the big burst is more effort than build and spend from Feral. Even playing BT happens naturally when spreading around Rakes
And if we’re honest, its about 75% damage. Still a huge gap but better than the hyperbole of 50%.
This is how it feels when i get 2-3 Apex procs back to back in large groups.
I actually think we’re looking in the wrong spot here. Instead of worrying about the damage of bites vs. bleeds I actually think this is an energy/combo point problem. Damage profile aside, when people say that they want Feral to be bleed focused I think they mean that they want to spend the majority of their time worrying about and managing their bleeds. However ever since the talent rework, energy and combo points are plentiful. Since the timer on your bleeds are static, that means the vast majority of your GCDs and finishers are direct damage. The point of the rotation is to cycle through as many Bites as possible. Doubly so during Berserk and Apex.
The resource management side of Feral is a lot of what makes it unique. There aren’t very many energy specs in the game and what makes energy a unique resource is that it decouples your rotation from the GCD. That’s why energy classes all have a 1.0s GCD, a feature unique to them. Energy classes are supposed to alternate between periods of high activity and periods of low activity where they set up and then pay off. But when energy is abundant enough such that the GCD becomes the limiting tempo factor again, that paradigm is lost.
Feral has way too many energy fixing talents. I think they need to be either removed or tuned down. When this happens, we won’t be able to move through the rotation as quickly and we will bite less. That makes it safer to up the damage of our bleeds while still keeping our less frequent bites relatively powerful. Suddenly proper snapshotting and bleed timer management becomes much more important rather than how quickly you can cycle through bites.
Part of me also wonders if we should change how Primal Wrath works. No doubt Feral needed a powerful AoE spender and Primal Wrath is exactly what the doctor ordered, but it also means that it’s extremely difficult to tune Feral’s AoE and single target independently since they both heavily rely on Rip. Not sure I have an easy answer to that.
Personally though, I don’t mind being a ramp-up class. I want to excel in longer fights through powerful sustained damage. I don’t mind burst classes being better on shorter-lived enemies.
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Sure this could work for AoE, but you just screwed over ST as all those “energy fixers” no longer apply. This is what im referring to by fixing one problem and creating another.
We could also shorten all of our bleed timers and increase their potency reducing the overall amount of Bites as well, but that doubles down on the problems Ferals have had in the past of being heavily punished for a single mistake thats hard to recover from.
This is kind of where we sit now. Even if we break down our damage profile, we can see the average overall damage for Rip is on par with the average hit for Bite. We just gave so much time between refreshing Rips that we’re getting 3-4 times the amount of Bites in, which people i believe are misjudging as being so Bite heavy
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Could you walk me through this? I’m not sure why ST is more dependent on energy saving than AoE is. Is that because our AoE damage is already almost all Rip? I think that’s a different problem, the Primal Wrath problem I mentioned earlier.
Feral has done good ST damage while having less energy fixing in the past so I’m not sure why it would be so much harder now.
Oir energy “fixers” comes from us being able to choose Predator talent along side everything else as opposed to in the past having to pick and choose between one or the other.
Tireless Pursuit and Frantic Moment do help in the long run, but hardly. Single target still suffers from energy starvation.
So to slow down energy generation because of unlimited energy in AoE scenarios, you slow down ST even more
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There is a world where both bleeds and bites can exist with a well designed tree. I personally prefer much more when feral plays like a sub rogue and has big shreds and big bites, which is why although the tankiness and playstyle of necro felt good in SL, I found myself playing Niya and Convoke for big bites and set-up kill potential FAR more.
Feral self-healing being neutered, pruning of our kit and spreading it out on the class tree(to the point where you can’t get everything you used to), and trying to blend the two playstyles of bleeds and bites together in one class tree made feral feel worse this expansion IMO.
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Yeah good times, Savage Roar to amp all those DOTs too which nowadays is just replaced with a Bite, and LI doing big damage then.
Yes maybe a fresh start is what you need if you don’t enjoy the spec, if you feel like you’re doing half the damage but putting in twice the effort, you are clearly not enjoying it one bit.
The ramp up time isn’t as significant as people here make it out to be, although naturally being a DOT spec you do need stuff to live to get value, but this is only more commonly an issue when doing trivial content or outgearing content. There’s so many specs which have longer setups too. You are mistaking ramp up time with lack of bursty CDs, and even then burst isn’t something we are lacking this season. Maybe if you are doing 20 keys at this point in the season you will especially feel it pack to pack because they are so outgeared now.
The issue is more Blizzard undertunes a lot of raid adds either by design or mistake, where they keep putting in adds that are dying way too fast. Fortunately as Feral we can just opt out of AOE in these situations we aren’t good in and full blast boss instead.
Bite is doing 45% of our damage in raid right now. I’m not bringing this up now to complain, more to point out it’s literally like that now.
I also see this take all the time that Bite = burst and will fix whatever perceived Feral problems people make up, and it’s for the most part completely untrue, especially in AOE.
We have lived high Bite damage profiles through BFA, Shadowlands, and even now, and putting all eggs in a Bite dmg profile is the best way to severely limit the spec. DOT profile is broadly more useful because it scales in so many damage profiles where Bite does not. More importantly it comprises of many more of our abilities, not just one singular thing.
Feral has been played in RWF this tier, played in MDI season 1 and M+ meta then (when it had extremely lacklustre burst and a tier-set based around DOTs/consistency). Feral competes, and the ramp up time stuff in this thread is a bit overdone.
A good take, at least some can appreciate classes are supposed to play and feel differently and fulfill different niches. I’m going to look past everything you said about combo points though.
? I have no idea what averages you are looking at. But 4x Bites to one Rip is a little too much given it’s supposed to be the costlier finisher that you have to weigh up whether you can squeeze an extra one in or not. This was even stated in the bluepost with the Feral tree rework from late 2022 and has just always been one of the key pieces of gameplay with Feral that you would consider. But it currently somewhat fails to live up to this, although it’s better now with RP gone, and it feels pretty good in M+ ST at least.
There is a huge distinction between having some limitations vs starvation. If we were starved that would imply we can barely keep our DOTs up or fit in Bites, which simply isn’t true.
Yes good. Feral ST pacing is pretty good in M+ though I will say, but in raid it’s too fast. Part of that is attributed to it being late in season 3 though. But single-target does not need to be sped up in any way shape or form.
Speeding up Feral results in just spamming more filler like Bite and it further impacts the weighting of damage profile, e.g. diminishes DOTs. Also means Tiger’s Fury gets extended too long when Feral is too fast pace. TF historically was an ability that used to heavily favour DOTs through snapshotting where those abilities of ours could benefit from it long after it expired, but when the uptime becomes so high it starts benefitting filler equally.
Honestly though I’m more or less ok with Feral pace at the moment, even if my preference would be slower I know broadly people do prefer a bit too fast than a bit too slow. But if they start adding more energy talents or increasing the pace I’d definitely not be pleased. Omen procs a bit too much and BrS recharges a bit too fast but otherwise energy/pacing is fine enough.
The spec is absolutely not even close to energy starved though as you suggest. You should go watch some Feral vids of last xpac alone and see the contrast.
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I actually would target CP generation before Frantic Momentum. (And I think you mean a different talent from Tireless Pursuit given that that’s a move speed talent.) Soul of the Forest generates a tremendous amount of energy especially in AoE since you Primal Wrath every 2 or 3 GCDs. Especially since Primal Wrath is significantly cheaper than Bite in terms of energy.
Come to pally! I switch side and is been a fun ride for ret pally after the rework. Even port pally is better than Guardian druid.
Lol. No offense taken. I’m pretty sure you and I have gone back and forth on Feral design philosophy before and I’m pretty sure we’re two different schools of Feral scholar. Over the course of the day I’ve actually been thinking to myself that my issue might actually be more with Soul of the Forest than with anything else. Soul of the Forest is the main key that directly turns CP into more energy and once you throw in Apex that’s a lot of energy refund. Though it also doesn’t help that now with Raging Fury, frequent finishers also mean Tiger’s Fury is nearly infinite which means that snapshotting management is also severely diminished.
So maybe my issue isn’t in one talent but in a few different talents working together. Which is ostensibly a good thing - I like talent synergy. But I wonder if our resources are too coupled now?
Then again I’m one of the insane people who doesn’t think energy starvation is a real thing and whose favorite version of Feral was early Legion when we ran BT, Jagged Wounds, and Savage Roar. If we had just a bit more room in that rotation for a few more bites I would have called it perfect. But I think I’m a more meticulous Feral-enjoyer than many modern Ferals are.
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