I don’t even understand why they are bringing the eclipse system back. One of the biggest complaints in the moonkin community for years was about the eclipse system. Everyone wanted it gone. 
4 Likes
It sounds cool in theory but I remember in WoD (I think it was) the eclipse bar: Gaining power going over to solar, then losing it and going over to lunar gaining power, and back and forth. It felt good when you reached the peak and your spells were doing that fat damage but the in-between part kind of sucked tbh. If they can make the peaks last longer (lol) and the transition shorter they could be on to something here.
Nature’s Swiftness worked good with healing touch since HT was a pretty big heal. With regrowth its weak, and if its on gcd its worthless
2 Likes
Read throguh some of the other covenant abilities…we are pretty much left in the dirt compared to the other classes.
Without the BIS azerite traits + BIS 2ndary stats feral is not a functional class. Now that blizz is removing azerite…feral will just fall through the ground , it will be a long forgotten meme. Changing 1 talent will not save feral.
Guardian…the meme tank…will stay meme.
for em it really seems like they want less druids in game…dunno what else to read out of this.
3 Likes
“There are too many Resto Druids in Mythic+, so let’s make the other 3 specs less fun! That’ll do it!”
5 Likes
Yeah in guardian spec i got ilvl473 and same traits as the top ranking m+ guardian. I got oneshot by the boss in Alterac valley…while a AV a little earlier a prot warrior with like 500K less health tanked boss+towercommander hardly taking dmg.
There needs to be changes massivly larger than a 30% heal on 2 min cd.
From reading about Starsurge it will extend the current Eclipse to continue focusing power into either Wrath or Starfire. Maybe the intended idea of the spec is to manage the duration of your eclipse? Maybe that’s how it worked in wrath, I do not know.
I actually like the resto changes. Cyclone baseline again is huge for our m+/ pvp utility. Need to see the numbers on how swiftmend is going to work, specifically which HoT’s it will consume and how much. But i like the idea of using it more often, then having to talent into prosperity and how clunky it fells now. Also depends on talent changes, but it could actually be really neat with germination. Nourish im still undecided on, again just need to see the numbers first.
Re-reading some comments people made and I agree with some things people pointed out.
-
Changes are being made to move back toward an old-school style of balance. Looking at the Druid changes a lot of them felt like “Well lets just take this idea from 10-15 years ago (Eclipse, Starfall position, Swiftmend) and just bring those back”. Then when you look at other classes, more of their changes are “lets bring things back to baseline for all specs and create new cool interactions between abilities”. I don’t think it’s a great idea to return a spec and abilities to the gameplay from 10-15 years ago, while the game has evolved substantially from then.
-
Resto’s mastery is based on stacking HoTs. Now with this change to Swiftmend, we have to go against what our mastery is supposed to be in order to heal. Also trying to think, I don’t know of any other HoT or DoT in the game that you need to remove in order for another spell to be cast. There’s probably a reason for that :think:
-
Starfall now being a melee radius AoE. I’m sure some people liked this because thats how it was from Wrath -> WoD, but I can’t help feel that it would be like current Arcane AoE. We are a ranged DPS spec with some of the highest range in the game (45 yards, only equal/outranged by MM hunters) and now I need to stand within what, 10 yards to AoE? Just like Arcane mages are “I’m standing back here to do damage, oh no wait now I need to stand next to the mob to Arcane Explosion AoE”. I don’t exactly see this going too well unless we get Hurricane back to fill the void of current Starfall as a ranged AoE.
Edit to add another point concerning affinities:
- I believe that Guardian Druid will still keep Ursol’s Vortex because that is tied to the Guardian affinity talent? So if you’d take Balance affinity for Typhon, I believe we will still keep it. However, I feel that too much may be tied into affinities and we’d need to begin making tough decisions on which ones to bring. Currently affinities provide skills for other forms, many of which seem to be becoming baseline. So either we will be gaining new active abilities for each affinity, or just a passive effect and the new utility skills. This can cause an issue if we keep the actives though in that from one talent we need to determine a) which active skills we’d want, if any (usually not an issue) b) what passive we want (range from balance, move speed, ysera’s dream, ect.) and c) a CC ability. With 3 things relying on one talent choice, I feel that there will be many conflicting choices where we now need to decide whether taking a CC ability one of the affinities provides somehow outweighs the passive that another provides (such as Typhoon from Balance outweighing taking the passive heal from Resto)
4 Likes
Alright, my $0.02.
I’m glad that Ferocious Bite and Ironfur are making a comeback for all specs. It always felt weird to have a builder, but no spender in off-spec cat and bear forms. Cyclone is also welcome, as are Barkskin and Stampeding Roar for the specs that are missing them.
Parceling our utility spells out into the Affinities isn’t particularly offensive to me. It’ll be a boon for Boomkins who will now get Typhoon plus something else, but kind of a bummer for Guardians who like using the Ursol’s Vortex plus Typhoon trick for grouping mobs. While I’m on the topic of Affinities though, Blizzard please, please, PLEASE add Swipe to the Guardian Affinity list. Since non-Guardian Druids can no longer cast Moonfire in Bear form, Guardian Affinity Druids literally have nothing to push while Mangle and Thrash are on cool down.
For Balance, Eclipse is conceptually more interesting than what we have now, and more thematically aligned with the spec. That said, I don’t think it’s ever really lived up to that potential in the past, so I hope they have more in mind than simply rolling back to an older version of the spec. I was happy to hear that Starfall is going to be a relevant ability again. I think extending our DoTs is kind an exciting new mechanic too. Removing our ability to target it, I’m less crazy about. Historically Starfall has been infamous for pulling unwanted mobs, so taking control out of our hands seems… not great.
I was disappointed to see so little said about Feral. Despite several early hot fixes, it was really only 4 or 5 patches worth of scaling that has seen Feral in the decent state we’re in now. I’d hate to see that cycle repeated in Shadowlands. I’m in the camp of people that like Blood Talons for what it’s trying (though only partially succeeding) to be, an ability that promotes hybrid play, so I have mixed feeling about seeing it changed.
I was also disappointed at the lack of Guardian changes. Guardian isn’t horrible or anything, but it lacks depth. Still, I’m glad to see Berserk make a return.
In my opinion, Resto is just about perfect the way that it is now, so I was actually hoping to see less changes here. Swiftmend removing a HoT again seems like an odd choice. I don’t necessarily hate the idea of incurring some cost for our big, direct heal, but given our mastery, removing a HoT is a much bigger penalty than it was when that mechanic existed. I’m also a little concerned that big changes to Swiftmend signal an end to the Spirit of the Forest talent, which is a play style I’ve really enjoyed since they introduced it in Legion. Historically, I’ve always liked Nature’s Swiftness, but the three abilities they mentioned it affecting are all GCD length cast times already, so I can’t see its return impacting much outside PvP where it will be welcome. The idea of being able to talent into a direct heal isn’t necessarily bad. We’ll see what Nourish is up against in the talent tree. If SotF does end up going away, it may be more attractive to me.
3 Likes
I have no clue I didn’t play Druid in WotLK
Guess I throw this comment in here rather than making a new post.
Concerning a change to Swiftmend instead of what Blizzard is proposing:
What if it functioned like Deathbolt does for Afflock? Instead of doing a direct, phat heal like it does now, or removing a HoT to heal for it like Blizzard is proposing, it would instead be: “Heal a target for x% of the remaining value of the HoTs on the target”. If Blizzard is looking to make a change to Swiftmend, this could perhaps be more aligned to synergies with Resto’s play style and not go directly against it.
One issue I could see though would be the x% healing simply being so much, or if you have such a large amount of HoTs on one target it would make it too strong such as in PvP.
2 Likes
They can always tune our mastery depending. I do agree it feels weird, but i actually like that we’re forced to make a choice in letting our HoTs tick or having to sacrifice them for a direct heal. SOTF might become even better honestly if we use swiftmend more. I do agree rdruid feels fine as it is, but is also felt fine at the end of legion, and we had some doom and gloom coming into BFA, which turned out fine. However, def need to see how the talent tree ends up, and how much our HoTs do relative to nourish
Eclipse for Balance is a hard no for me. Really, did not enjoy that iteration of Balance.
Redesign of Bloodtalons isn’t surprising being they’ve been looking into it since that blue post (8.1?). I’m glad it’s changing, but hope people are smart with their feedback, and accept it needed to change. Hyperbole in whining are not helpful when trying to provide accurate feedback on such a key talent, that whatever feedback on provided, would be extremely important.
5 Likes
Right now it’s difficult to really give much feedback on the new Bloodtalons since all we have is a vague half-sentence describing it and no one is quite sure what exactly it means. So for now then I’ll settle for just defining what aspects of Bloodtalons I feel it’s important for Blizzard to preserve.
Since the main part of Bloodtalons is as a bleed snapshot, that’s obviously the most important function of it. Buffing other finishers and a shred here and there is whatever. But since you need to snapshot both Rake and Rip with it, planning your refreshes ahead of time so that you satisfy all three of the pandemic requirements, energy requirements, and snapshot requirements is the essence of what Feral play means to me so I want to keep Bloodtalons in that role. One of the things that worries me about the new Bloodtalons is that it doesn’t seem to interact with Rake at all so now Rake just becomes a button you hit during its pandemic with no other thought required, and depending on how the sequence to activate it works I worry that it simply becomes a passive buff to Rip that I don’t have to worry about since Rake, Shred, and Ferocious Bite are all spells I’m looking to cast frequently anyway. If it’s a snapshot I don’t have to worry about then it’s a bad snapshot.
3 Likes
Especially if you remove a small heal for a bigger one that you could potentially swiftmend off as well. Assuming the healing is based on the current value of the hot you’re taking off + interactions with mastery.
Sounds fun to me!
Absolutely.
It’s vague af really, but we’ll soon be moving into Alpha, and will need to keep into account that Bloodtalons is being re-designed, and we’re able to give solid feedback, ideas and solutions instead of hyperbole and tantrums.
As an example, with what little we know, you’ve given information on wanting control for when it’s applied, and having it also interact with Rake.
That’s definitely a start, and when we see more from data mining, and testing, we can discuss on more detail in how this new version of Bloodtalons can be improved upon to make an enjoyable experience for all Feral players 
3 Likes
The Alpha isn’t even released yet. There could be some room for concern if the article was 100% accurate to what is found in the game. Until the Alpha/Beta is released chill out of the “fixes” and sharing of assumptions.
5 Likes
I’ll finally come back to Druid after quitting when Legion removed all the interesting aspects of Balance Druid and turned them into generic casters.
Now is the time to let Blizzard know not to go back to eclipse. If you wait until, the chances of them reverting it will be a lot smaller.
4 Likes