Druid Class Tuning -- March 8

Classes Druid
21

Just did M+ for the first time this season, and it was devastating. I feel OK in raid at the moment, although if you buy into subcreation.net, ferals are no great shakes in raid either (at the moment ferals are the only spec on F tier in M+ on subcreation, including all dps, healers, and tanks, but are C tier in raid).

Here are my thoughts:

There are three buffs:

  1. One whose primary benefit is haste…thanks Ray, we ferals <3 haste. I’m not sure why Blizz didn’t pick “highest secondary stat” to equalize the benefit across specs like they’ve tended to do as of late.
  2. One whose primary benefit is reduced CDs. I think overall this is fine, but it’s going to be just like the tier set, it desyncs us with things we’ve build around (like trinkets and the cool weapon from last raid), so the benefit is bittersweet.
  3. One whose primary benefit is stealth. Well, that will save on my invis pots at least…oh, wait…

To top it off, the new affix adds a whole lot of aoe, which was never our specialty. In fights where I could at least give the benefit of our single target niche, I now find my initial burst is diffused (yes, I’m nightfae, so convoke loves to moonfire the new runes that somehow fly just far enough away, and invariably for those fights, most dps classes will take the haste buff over other choices. In short, in ST fights which I could justify my existing in the M+ with very strong showings (if not outright dominant) last season, I can’t even keep up this season.

The one thing that may have been to help our position in M+ would be to help mitigate our weak point (aoe). Yet, at the end of PTR, Blizz did an essentially untested 65% reduction in that tier bonus. I can’t think of anything they’ve nerfed that much in one increment. I am actually pleased to see they decided return to incrementalism with this latest buff, but I suspect it will need to be followed up with succeeding changes.

I am aware that it is early days, so I’ll withhold judgement as scaling takes place with new gear and legendaries, but as of now, much of the joy of M+ as of now is substantially diminished this season.

22

Hey Flapz you have much success with Feral/Boomy in 2’s by chance?

23

Never said the other covenants were. I was specifically referring to everyone’s comments about how the tier set needs to be changed back so it works specifically for one covenant instead of the spec

24

First and most importantly; I appreciate the feedback and I’m sure many other ferals do as well. Largely we all have some serious concerns over the effectiveness of feral at end-game content (although PvP seems to be an outlier at the moment) and it’s good to at least know Dev’s are paying attention.

The 2pc change: I’m torn on this. I actually like the idea of it being a little overkill because it adds a bit of forgiveness to less experienced players and ensures that convoke will be able to synch up with Berserk while not overly affecting the amount of damage that very experienced players can get out of the change. However it creates something of an anti-pattern in that you end up holding our biggest dps cooldown, Convoke, which feels weird and unnatural to do.

The 4pc change: To exaggerate slightly, you could add a zero on the end and make it 250% and it still wouldn’t make ferals ‘mandatory’ in M+ for AoE. Obviously +250% would be way too strong in Single Target situations. But based on initial appearances and damage contributions this could be closer to +50% instead of +25% based purely on the projected ST performance which would bring us to upper-middle of the pack in dps (napkin math of ~17k-ish ST in BiS).

If M+ remains a form of end-game content I strongly recommend you look at increasing the baseline AoE capabilities and/or utility that feral specifically brings to the table. Because ferals damage contribution is so lopsided in favor towards ST over AoE, you’re going to find that it’s difficult to tune our damage performance in anything without having spillover or scope problems.

1 Like
25

I’ve never played it. I did go against it the other day ironically and found it strange. Took longer to kill as boomy/healer than I would have liked due to their playstyle but I just killed the boomy eventually. He can’t heal forever.

It could definitely see success but I wouldn’t consider it top tier or anything.

1 Like
26

Why do you just flat out refuse to fix feral?

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27

I hope your talent design and DPS skill composition ratio in the future version of Feral can be normal.
Let our small number of Feral players participate in various activities and competitions to greatly improve the game experience

Now even how to adjust the 4 set bonus doesn’t make much sense
The most basic problems have not been solved for several years.
It’s time Blizzard has to deal with this

This change does not improve the single DPS very much, and it may improve the AOE, but it is not ideal.

28

Looking at logs, there isn’t anything that suggests that you have to Owlweave to be competitive, or that it’s even that impactful. Many of the top logs don’t seem to incorporate it, and the ones that do, it makes up 0.5 to 1% of their damage tops.

30

I agree. I’ve got purple parses on every key last season except for 2 and I don’t owlweave simply because the difference is so minor for how hectic it makes the rotation.

31

You guys should go easy on the intern that got the short straw and had to deal with feral.
Also, look into stockholm sydrome, most of you seem to have it. NF is not the only covenant. But since you all have it, by far most of the complaints are about it, that is all the intern sees and is all that will be addressed soooo.

Blizz has stated a goal of giving difficult choices, have they lived up to this?

I’m also pretty bummed by the theory crafting community. I think i heard guilty say somewhere that they looked into venthyr, saw it was garbage and stopped.

That seems pretty idiotic. I would have preferred them to run out the numbers on stats and conduits and all the other stuff. When I go into torghast with a bleed focused build I do way more over all dmg than just trying to buff convoke. Please stop being so focused on convoke and give me another option. I know it’s burst dmg which can be sexy, which is probably why so many people are smitten by it.

But maybe they have and I just don’t know about it, but Guilty being in the “fix feral for NF” camp is pretty clear. And that is what the intern hears, and it’s probably just one person so…

In the end, this is a theorycrafting vs blizz spreadsheets or whatever they use. Theorycrafting says feral is garbage regardless of the covenant, blizz say’s it’s not???

32

100% of the top raid logs -DO- use it. If you see Starsurge on a Feral Log…they Owlweaved. A decent uptime on Sunfire? Owlweave.

33

M+ logs aren’t really a thing? There are so many variables it’s not worth considering.

34

The comment we were replying to was that we needed to competitive in aoe. There aren’t any pure aoe fights that I’ve really noticed in the raid so far where owlweaving is really necessary. I can see a few fights where it might help in single target but that’s about it.

Could be that I’m bad at owl weaving in general, but usually by the time I spend the 4 globals to shift owl, mf, sf, shift back to cat, my energy is back up and I’m ready to bite. I parse fairly highly in raid too (only did one boss last night but parsed a 98 without owlweaving). Perhaps I’m missing something?

You can look at my parses if you want to critique. My main is angeliqe@bonechewer

35

I think they dropped the ball with Hearth of the Wild.

Originally I was very excited to see its return. Its Mists version was absolute beast mode.
Instead what we got was a talent that says "hey, we know the affinity row sucks. Here’s ANOTHER talent that makes them suck less.

I was excited to use it based off a promise of pushing fun/high numbers, not min/maxing .03%.

36

Every instance of both combined that I see on feral logs makes up at most 1.5%, most instances being sub 1%. It’s not required.

37

simmed with full BiS gear it still does non-competitive AoE DPS. so blizzard has no idea what their doing

1 Like
38

I’m also pretty bummed by the theory crafting community. I think i heard guilty say somewhere that they looked into venthyr, saw it was garbage and stopped.

Its bad because a lot of its power comes from haste scaling and as a result it isn’t good because Haste scales so poorly for us.

Even when simming all APLs and perfect play (impossible with Venth) it very much falls far behind any of the other covenants. So further attempts to push it don’t really have a purpose because it is by a long run the lowest performing covenant for Feral because of all the haste scaling both in RF and in the best soulbind (Nadjia)

People don’t enjoy the playstyle of Kyrian generally. Its just not an interesting or fun ability.

The only other Covenant that could fit is Necrolords for a Bleed Heavy build, which does have a strong faction in the Feral community believe it or not, but because of how hard bite scales NF just outperforms it sadly. There’s also a problem of the whole faction doesn’t fit the druid aesthetic as well as NF. Which is why you see so many Druids lean towards it.

Now all that said.

In the end, this is a theorycrafting vs blizz spreadsheets or whatever they use. Theorycrafting says feral is garbage regardless of the covenant, blizz say’s it’s not???

Lets ask the question: Who do you trust more? Who has the better track record of being correct. Generally from a raw numbers perspective: The theory crafting community. Blizzard does not design around numbers. They design gameplay first then tune the numbers later.

By Blizz’s own admission:

we’ve gotten a chance to incorporate a great deal of the feedback provided and take a fresh look at the numbers and we found that – as players rightly called out – there was a disconnect in how impactful this bonus was in situations such as single-target encounters.

The Theorycrafting community was able to quickly identify a problem in the numbers without even having to simulate it. The sims backed it up. If Blizz had magic numbers on the backend that were perfect, then this wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

So when you have people in the theorycrafting community telling you:

  1. This is a weak “fix” and does not address the core problems.
  2. Part of this fix breaks interactions that many of the Feral community have leaned on for nearly 2 years now.
  3. This breaking makes the Cooldown this is supposed to be making better feel worse every other time you use it.

Honestly, I’m in the camp that the 4pc should be beefy and in the future worked into Incarn as an interesting talent. Feral is supposed to be good at ST and maybe 2 target cleave. That doesn’t mean they need to be a wet noodle in AoE and AoE burst.

3 Likes
39

I did enjoy that power while it lasted. It was a very noticable bump in damage (assuming you had the correct powers to capitalize on it) and gave Thrash somewhat of a meaning, even if the ability itself is weak.

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40

WFR was my favorite trait from BFA. Really gave you a reason to use your Thrash spell.

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41

A perversion of it being “classic”. Pandering evermore to those who cry rabbit.

1 Like