Energy starvation is definitely not a real thing you are correct. Also this is more or less my dream version of Feral too, though probably more the Necro version of it from last xpac, however I’ve accepted things have got to move on like Savage Roar and the spec should evolve (although evolving does not mean removing combo points ).
SOTF is fine though, good even. It feels good in Berserk, it feels good when it gives you that little bit of extra energy after using a finisher to just barely hit that 3rd builder you needed to proc BT, it feels good with Apex procs, it feels good when Convoke fills up your energy and so on.
I said it in a post above but personally I feel the spec can feel a bit inundated with omen procs due to MOC, and I also think BrS recharges way too quickly at 8s hasted (ends up closer to 6), and BrS = cheap. Would personally prefer couple sec added on to that and damage increased for a bit of burst, slightly closer to Legion.
Yes Raging Fury extends are a bit too long, though indeed not an issue with raging fury itself but rather pacing and also slightly too much added base duration from Predator. I like the dynamic TF durations, but yes 95%+ uptime in patchwerk is a bit sily.
i put in far less effort on my dh and enhance shammy than i do on my feral and i get the same numbers or better. (and it would only be better cause they are in a better place gear wise) like out of every spec since i play at least 1 spec on every class feral is the only 1 that feels like im trying to min max on just to do the same as everyone else. compared to bm its probably 3x the effort cause i can phone it in on my hunter and destroy
getting 2-3 apex procs back to back feels awesome but it equally feels bad when you dont
I agree the spec plays better without Savage Roar than with it. And just to clarify - I don’t want to remove CP either. Dual resource management is one of the things I love about the spec so removing one of those resources entirely is not something I’d advocate for. My big thing right now is that I think we gain too many CP too quickly, not that CP as a concept is bad.
There’s actually a reason I haven’t brought up Berserk while talking about CP and that reason is that I actually like the change they made to Berserk where finishers are so much more common. As a ~2ish min CD, I think it’s absolutely fine for our gameplay to shift and for us to go hog wild with finishers during Berserk. Certainly it’s more fun than the “same thing but faster” version of Berserk that we used to have. So when I’m talking about CP and energy generation, I’m largely talking about how Feral feels outside of our cooldowns.
I actually completely forgot that due to the talent rework, this expansion is the first time in… maybe forever that I actually play with MoC. Back when it was mutually exclusive with Bloodtalons I used to recommend it as the “not quite as powerful but much simpler” talent option to some of the people I taught Feral to, but it was never the sort of talent I took for myself.
As a bit of an experiment, I’m going to list off what I see as the core components of Feral and how well I think we currently meet them. I’d be interested to see how many of them you agree with.
Feral is an energy management class. Which means their pace is determined not by their GCD, but by their energy availability. Ideally they would alternate between periods of slow set up and periods of fast payoff. That said there also should be space in our rotation for SOME direct damage like Ferocious Bite. - Currently I don’t think this is met very well if at all. No need to expand on this as it’s what I’ve been talking about for most of the thread.
Feral is a DoT/debuff management spec. Which means that keeping your DoTs up and refreshing them during their pandemic windows is very important. - Currently I think we hit this just fine. Without old Sabertooth and with things like Lunar Inspiration/Adaptive Swarm I have no problems here.
Feral is a dual-resource spec. Meaning they must manage two different resources (energy and combo points) independently. - As I said earlier, I think both resources are currently too plentiful. The skeleton is there in theory but I don’t feel much like I’m managing either resource much at all at the moment.
Feral is a snapshotting spec. Which means that managing temporary buffs to empower bleeds is a crucial skill of the spec. - I don’t think we currently meet this well enough for my liking. Managing stealth through Incarn Prowl/Sudden Ambush is nice but as we already mentioned, Tiger’s Fury is a non-issue and I think Bloodtalons is too easy to manage by accident.
Feral is a cat spec. Meaning they are mobile. - We pass this easily and always have. We have good movement cooldowns combined with cat form’s natural speed increase.
Feral is a hybrid spec, most prominently in off-healing. I like putting my Predatory Swiftness Regrowths on people who need them, and I like planning Nature’s Vigil and Innervate timings. Back in Shadowlands I also liked the ability to pop HotW and do a Night Elf form Convoke as a healer cooldown. That’s still technically possible but harder to find places to do. - I think we have all the tools to meet this but not enough juice. For sure Dragonflight has been one of the best gifts Feral has ever gotten in terms of tools like NV and Innervate, but after the Regrowth and NV nerfs I don’t think that doing well in this aspect of Feral play creates enough of a noticeable impact. This is actually one of the (few) things I liked about the Wildstalker tree after they clarified that Regrowth could trigger blooms.
Feral is also a hybrid tank spec. Which means we should be able to protect ourselves in high damage situations. - Mixed grade here too. I think we have all the active tools we need. Barkskin, Survival Instincts, and Bear Form are all good cooldowns and the ability to combine them when needed is good. But I think there’s a tuning problem here given that both Druid DPS are apparently the most fragile specs in high level content at the moment. I don’t know if that’s because it’s too hard for us to get defensive talents on or tree or if we need more passive defensives or what, but we should be better at it than we are even if I don’t think the mechanisms for it should change much.
Feral is a Druid spec. Which means it should be able to bring Druid’s nice set of class utility. - Mixed score here. We have far better access to Druid utility than we ever used to after the Dragonflight talent rework. I’ve been loving my vortex/typhoon combo and Incap Roar. But the way the tree is laid out makes it really awkward to take a lot of our good utility without making major compromises in other areas. Remove Curse is obviously the biggest offender here but even things like Maim, Typhoon, and Hibernate are too difficult to access in the talent tree. (Also Blizz put Rebirth back on Predatory Swiftness. I hate being the only Druid spec to pay the cat tax for that.)
Im aware. I have no issues with it. Perhaps i phrased it wrong but i was addressing the people who continue to use that phrase. We need to be able to get our bleeds out and then have the mobs live long enough for the bleeds to do something. Whereas it really doesnt take much to get a few Rakes and a lot of Rips rolling.
And i think a large portion of the playerbase doesnt realize this. They see the overall damage for a fight that involves these quick dying adds (roots on Iggy and Tindy) where Feral can and does (?) opt out and focuses on boss instead. Yes, killing adds is integral part of the encounter, but better suited to other classes. Reigning it in to damage to boss perspective changes the outlook a bit and that goes over a lot of peoples heads. The posting of the ranking chart is very much misunderstood.
Well this is always going to be the case. We can see it with Sin and Affliction and even Destro to a lesser extent where youve got filler ability doing a large chunk of the damage. But that comes from repeated use inside a duration window where things do not need to be refreshed. Which i dont know what a solution to that would be?
Take away Apex perhaps and bring back Savage Roar in a way? We’d still have Bite doing 30%+ on ST encounters though.
Agreed, 100% and my post history involving Feral will reflect that. When i mention “competing”, im keeping in their terms where they’re talking about damage done in a given setting (usually based on upfront damage/on ability press). Which as a DoT focused spec, our Rake, thrash, PW is not gonna do the same damage in those 3 globals as Essence Break, Death Sweep, Eye Beam for instance. And this is what they always seem to be comparing too.
So i wasnt looking at the amount done over a duration, simply one Rips full damage to one Bites full damage. So its not that all of our damage is focused into Bite, simply that we press Bite more than we do Rip.
Yup this one is on me. Starvation is a bad term to use in the way you described. Limited would be a much better term that ill use going forward. But im saying that in ST we’re still pooling energy whereas in AoE (like m+ for example) we’re gcd locked more than being limited by energy.
I wasnt talking about speeding anything up. But instead just not slowing it down.
You think so? I guess i dont have any complaints about BrS recharge time as it is what it is. Could be from being late in the season with increased haste values and frantic momentum proccing? And outside of Tyr weeks in m+ my ST encounters are limited but ive always felt like i was praying for an omens proc
Yes that was my point. If energy glut is a problem more in AoE than in ST and if SotF affects AoE much more than ST then it seems like one of the main things to look at.
I do but that was also kind of by design since I think we have too much energy in ST right now too even if I don’t think the problem is as pronounced as it is in AoE. I agree that Predator contributes a lot more energy in AoE.
Though that said after chatting with Cheesy I think MoC has a larger impact on the pace of Feral in ST than any amount of energy does so perhaps I should be looking at that instead.
I honestly cannot think of a compelling argument to bring a feral druid to a group over a ret pally. The only reason the Race to World First groups brought a feral was to get Gift of the Wild and for once Boomy was in a much worse place than feral. If it wasn’t for GotW, they wouldn’t have even brought a Druid at all.
Giving Paladins a battle rez is basically a nail in the coffin of druid utility, especially feral.
This is one thing I think Feral has been increasingly failing at starting with the loss of power shifting. The mobility of feral at this point is pretty much on par with all other melee classes and arguably less mobile than Ret Paladin. The only thing keeping feral above warrior, DH, and rogue is wasting talents on Starfire, Sunfire, and Moonkin Form to get the increased range from Astral Influence and the root breaking even with suffering the global cat tax. And I’m talking mostly from a PvE perspective. Feral is really hurting in PvP as snares and roots have been reworked over the years to diminish the PvP power of mobility from shifting while feral still depends heavily on mobility for survival.
With 25% haste, going off roughly my gear for current tier + factoring in an average for Frantic Momentum uptime,
You’d have 13.8 baseline energy regen, add approx +1.4 to that per point of Tireless Energy (obviously not factoring in any potential energy saved/gained with the larger energy cap).
Omen 7.5 procs per min, with MOC its 11.25. Looking at a mere two logs quickly of Shred/Thrash/BrS casts with Omen up, get a rough average of 36 energy saved per Omen proc.
(36*7.5) / 60 = 4.5 energy sec with base Omen, 6.75 with MOC. That’s +2.25 energy/sec from MOC (2.5 if played perfectly)
That’s pretty much equivalent to 1/2 your base energy regen from procs.
If I use this makeshift spent omen procs * 36 formulae on these two logs and compare to gain from SOTF, Omen procs provided approx 80% more energy than SOTF did.
However this obviously wouldn’t factor in situations such as getting an Omen proc with high/capped energy and using it, meaning it delays spending energy thereby halting your baseline energy regen a second or so, but this would be very minor anyway.
Omen is of course a core resource (will say energy source for simplicity), and in general Omen feels great, so there’s nothing wrong with this and naturally taking a talent to supplement it obviously should feel impactful.
But I personally feel the +50% Omen procs is little high, especially when the secondary effect is much more interesting and is only +15%.
But yeah TLDR MOC is a big factor in Ferals pacing nowadays.
Maybe you missed Legion where Brutal Slash was the most satisfying ability in the game.
For context it currently does equiv of 124% weapon damage, in Legion it was as high as 2700% weapon damage.
Obviously don’t expect it to go back to that and the recharge needs to be relatively low for BT, but what I’m saying is I personally think its current values (both damage and recharge) can be fine tuned slightly for a better balance. Now that Dire Fixation exists if you run into situations in AOE you don’t have Slash and Rake/Thrash don’t need casting, you can utilise Shred better here as prio dmg/filler/proccing BT.
I remember those days. During raid I was always planning specific moments to dump all three BS charges when some short-lived adds popped up. It was realistically the only way I could contribute to non-sustained AoE. Once those charges were spent my response to group adds was .
Yeah my Druid days didnr start until the beginning of BFA, but i did raid beside a Feral in early Legion (Nighthold) and he seemed to enjoy it.
Well when you think of it, SoTF is based off of combo points and requires nearly 3 full finishers to equate to single Omens proc consumed by Shred. And even the odd 2x omen procs in a single finisher fill up. So im not surprised by this.
Finding better results in AoE not running Dire Fixation. But given that, once you drop below 6 targets, Shred becomes the best filler anyway until Slash is available again
Yeah and obviously I just compared Omen with SOTF purely for reference to give a more tangible idea of how much work Clearcasts do in terms of energy. Omen obviously should be providing more energy, especially with MOC.
Sure there is still always something to press anyway even without Dire Fixation. But going back to the Feral with 25% Haste example, that equates to a BrS recharge rate of 6 sec which is incredibly fast. Even if you increased the base recharge by 25% to 10s, it still equates to 7.5 sec with Haste, so it’s only +1.5 sec per Recharge, very minor, lower in Lust etc and with different tier sets could easily run a lot more Haste too.
But if say you buffed BrS dmg 1:1 for how long you increase the base recharge time, so a 25% damage buff in this example, that goes a long way with Feral damage profile, especially with adds and such, but just better gameplay in general using your charges when they do more damage. Even then that doesn’t really do much in terms of bringing it back to Legion values , it’s better than nothing.
If we revamp the tree, can we add a talent that converts us from nature to necro? Remove our direct heal skills, or covert to dmg skills. Replace bleeds with poison or disease damage (bonus if it can spread). Add in a leach ability to skills to hit with each melee. Give our forms a blueish fiery glow. Let’s have some fun.
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