Bearweaving is now a 1.9% DPS gain for Feral. We appreciate the swift action on owlweaving but we’re now, again, facing the same issue with Lycara’s Meditation being a fairly substantial DPS gain.
4 Likes
Lycara’s Meditation continues to be the culprit here.
Taking action against specifically Feral bearweaving will just stave off the problem, just as taking action against Feral owlweaving did, and just as taking action against Balance humanweaving did on PTR.
Stanceweaving for throughput will always be a risk so long as the talent exists as-is. Even with the owlweaving nerfs, LM still makes doing so a DPS gain for Feral - just not as strong as bearweaving, or as strong as it was before the tuning.
Ultimately Lycara’s Meditation proves time and time again that it is (unintentionally) a problematic talent that allows for these optimizations to happen. It really does just need to be removed, or if anything reworked to provide some benefit post-shapeshift other than secondary stats.
3 Likes
Leave bearweaving in, i just aint trying to be an owl.
I agree that bearweaving is more palatable mechanically (no maintaining Sunfire, no dead GCD since Mangle is an instant) and aesthetically than owlweaving. The problem is, the stance needs to be either stanceweaving for throughput is unequivocally healthy design-wise, or it unequivocally is not.
Blizzard’s stance is the latter - hence why Lycara’s Meditation has already seen multiple fixes due to enabling other forms of stanceweaving for throughput (most recently owlweaving).
2 Likes
The fact that the talent exists means they intend for weaving.
I think the celebration for owl weaving being removed and saving feral from a dps increase with a weird sunfire maintenance is a bit silly. They basically nerfed damage by 2-3% flat out and it is being celebrated like blizz saved the day. The option of just don’t take the talent (or better yet, just don’t weave/sunfire) would have resulted in the same fix.
Here we are again cheering for blizz to do a 2% damage nerf so that a higher apm player doesn’t make our parses lower valued by weaving a random mangle into their rotation.
If blizz thinks weaving is “unequivocally unhealthy,” remove the talent.
My guess (since it isn’t written anywhere) is that the talent wasn’t intended for weaving. It was intended to give a small boon for the moments where we were having to swap forms for utility.
The reason it became a weaving talent was strictly due to feral being a downtime spec.
1 Like
Judging by blizzards actions over the last several expansions when weaving for dps looked like it was going to be a relevant gain I think it’s safe to say it’s not a gameplay pattern Blizzard wants to have Feral engage in.
2 Likes
This talent reads as a means of making shapeshifting for utility hurt your throughput less rather than encouraging shapeshifting in rotation as a throughput gain. The fact that Blizzard has performed multiple band-aid fixes aimed directly at this talent enabling such throughput gains suggests they agree with this interpretation.
Top-level players don’t want to do it but will because they have to optimize at a high level of play - not for parse chasing. Players who aren’t top-level but still play hard content and want to optimize their rotation to give their group the best chance don’t want to do it but are encouraged to. Players who weren’t going to do it anyway are unaffected by the change in the short-term.
EVERYONE is affected down the line when Feral gets slated for a buff made larger (or nerf made smaller) than it would have been otherwise without stanceweaving - which again, is desired by neither Blizzard nor the playerbase - inflating numbers by ~2%. Stanceweaving getting axed here (ideally by addressing the problem, not the symptoms) is a win-win.
If a blue post comes out stating that Lycara’s Meditation was intended to promote stanceweaving for throughput, but only certain kinds of stanceweaving rather than the interactions that have been slapped with a band-aid over the past two months - owlweaving as Feral, catweaving as Resto, humanweaving as Boomkin, or now incorporating bear form into opener as Boomkin - I will happily eat my words.