Are feral druids really that horrible?

Classes Druid
21

Feral buff ?

2 Likes
22

Probably even higher DPS than boomies on m+ (but less utility). And as a melee, you go against combat rogue and DH as option… unfair.

23

I don’t know if you’d do higher dps than boomies. I very very very rarely don’t do best ST boss damage as boomy. I will admit that on lower keys, our dps can suffer due to ramp up time. As it stands, if the content you’re doing has mobs dying quickly, then it’s not useful to moonfire everything. One sunfire and then lunar strike, yadda yadda. But, if we can dot every single mob and set up properly, the damage is there.

24

As a reminder, check the profiles of the druids of people saying feral is fine, they’re playing low teir mythics, low ilvl, and use basic ilvl 400 items from world bosses, they haven’t been able to benchmark on par.

25

but they can reach top 10 in lfr dps meters, so the spec is fine okay!!!

26

Oh good! I needed a goal to shoot for!

27

Context is important. They are decent single target and “eh” AoE. Bad at spread.

It’s ok to have strengths and weaknesses, especially in a raid environment where lots of people can back you up. It hurts more in 5 man content. Feral druids just don’t have any representation in truly painful keys. Any class/spec CAN do keys, but the optimal meta groups are dominating the leaderboard for good reason, and that makes pugging above 10 very difficult for “non-meta” classes.

1 Like
28

Unfortunately, there is never a good reason to bring a feral druid over a :chicken: or a rogue due to the lack of group utility. Rogues have lockpicking and shroud. :chicken: has treants, an aoe interrupt/silence, and innervate. The only thing feral has is a useless group run speed buff on a 2 min cd.

There are other issues with feral due to the horrible design of their talents and azerite traits, such as:

  • The passive talent options are stronger than the active options.
  • The “aoe” talent tier contains an ability better than shred in single target.
  • Traits and talents push us into using aoe abilities against a single-target.

Playing with lunar inspiration, savage roar, brutal slash, bloodtalons, iron jaws, and wild fleshrending would result in a rotation that is cancerous to play and consists of a minimum of 10 rotational abilities (shred, rip, rake, thrash, ferocious bite, maim, moonfire, savage roar, brutal slash, regrowth). You would think such a complicated spec would reward you with high damage for your perfect execution and hard work, but that isn’t the case. It’s a high risk, low reward spec.

2 Likes
29

Well, listing lockpicking as a reason isn’t really a reason. My Feral is a JC, and can open doors in BfA with a Legion JC cut. Did just this the other night in TD. It does come with a cost of being a profession than can do this and the mats required, so it’s not something MOST Ferals have, true.

But overall, you are correct. Ferals need an all the time useful, desired utility that is unique to them. Ion mentioned he wanted groups to have to make choices and potentially leave 2 or 3 things out of their group because there were too many choices and not enough slots. We aren’t nearly there yet, so I guess Blizzard has some work to do.

1 Like
30

This basically sums it up