This is actually a fantastic example. When I teach new Ferals (something I occasionally do in my guild) I’ve always recommended BT vs. LS (or MoC back before the talent rework) depending how well the player in question was able to manage BT.
I care about my performance. Always have. But if I was concerned about being the very best ever, I wouldn’t have mained Feral for 7 years. Part of caring about your own performance is knowing not just what talents are theoretically best, but also when you personally should deviate from those talents. I’ve seen plenty of players who pull better numbers when I have them swap to a talent set that works for them rather than copy whatever WoWhead says.
Actually, there are a number of top players who will use the lesser numerical options because they play better. Andy, arguably one of the best if not the best tank in the world, has repeatedly used passive abilities on BrM because of the button bloat. He typically will use the best performing talents when he’s pushing the highest keys, but he also switches to passives when he isn’t.
In short, you’re wrong, and the only obtuse person here is you.
This makes some sense. Catform > Rip > Bearform is 3 buttons for a spell that does about the same damage as maul. Better to just have it be a proc, even better just add the effect to the next maul. The whole tree is basically Tooth and Claw v2, anyway.
If they really want to lean into weaving shape shifting, there has to be a value added by the change. Turn cat form in a dps cooldown for guardians or turn bearform into a proper defensive for cats. Something a little wilder than a single rip and 3 missed globals of TnC procs and rage gen.
No one knows what the values are yet. With this pretty much being TnC, and Massive Attack pretty much being a frontal Apex, im betting we’ll be seeing talent tree changes.
Not to mention HotW being dead at 5 minutes, a quick change to that could easily make all of this worthwhile
Edit: for clarification, everyone is taking present tuning and numbers and applying these hero talents when we currently have isnt set up for said talents. Wait until things hit alpha and beta and get your hands on it before naysaying
But I’ll agree to the caveat that this only sucks when applied to current bear with current tuning. Assuming they do some work around synergies and shifting problems, it could be pretty cool. Kinda like warrior D stance.
I’m sorry if I always come across as being a downer, I’m just a little jaded from always feeling like I’m waiting on my ship to come on with this class.
I mean… the way this hero tree is balanced, it kinda does fit for what you want (from what I recall of your previous posts).
It is a bear tree that eschews the moonbear portion (making MF likely only worth pressing to keep up on single target). It throws way more power into maul, making the Incarn-Mangle-Raze-Mangle-Raze functionality work very well with Vicious Cycle.
Your Razes with Massive Attack (quite a few them during Incarn) will grant you a bleed with every MA, that doing your normal bear rotation goes up to 12sec, gives you a 5% more flat DR against all enemies hit. Also gives you an offensive boost for 6sec.
Also, you get 4% reduced magic damage taken and mangle deals 5% more damage and 8% more crit all the time.
It plays very much like current Incarn bear, but has up to 9% more reduced magic damage taken (most of the time) while the playstyle changes very little.
That isn’t actually too bad, and with the way the cat talents are balanced, you can effectively ignore them and enjoy your physical bear.
Rogue is a lot of fun solo pve. Stealth and stuns galore make it so you dont take damage at all. Not to mention bypassing all mobs and going straight for the mechanics.
Plus he stated facts. You can take any spec and do all the content in the game. So just pick the one you have fun with
I honestly don’t understand the question here. Rogue is my most common alt so I play it in outdoor PvE content quite a bit… what’s wrong with it? I’ve never had any particular trouble with Rogue compared to other classes.
I’d actually say I usually struggle with Mage in PvE the most but I’m fully willing to admit that’s a me problem. Can’t play casters to save my life and I’m uniquely bad at Mage.
If you say so. I don’t really care enough either way if you don’t want to have a straight conversation with me. But rest assured if I were trolling, I would at least try to be more amusing about it.
Just a few last things from me quickly, more esoteric stuff 3/3 Feral related.
Ruthless Aggression (attack speed)
Given Omen is RPPM and assume MA will be too (?), then I don’t see much Feral synergy here outside of raw damage, but number would need to be way higher.
Don’t see why it wouldn’t just be a Haste buff instead for similar effect.
Also concern with reliance on Windfury.
The other option having the Tiger’s Fury element really makes this choice seem one dimensional both numerically but also in terms of gameplay/synergies.
Given there’s only 3 choice nodes across the tree, having 1 potentially locked wouldn’t be ideal, though I definitely see more attack speed synergies with Guardian (TnC procs after MA to extend Bleed etc) but again Haste does something similar.
100% PW DD
My assumption is this is a tuning lever for PW-TOW spam builds with this tree, all great if this is true.
PW not affected by Bloodtalons/LS will maybe disrupt the general priority. I’ve been meaning to make a guide about AOE finishers as I think Feral design is really interesting in this regard but essentially prioritising Rip snapshots in AOE is main prio and you can weave Bites when at 0 BT charges (especially in Zerk) to not overwrite for a small gain + prio dmg, and this is really such a good way of how the priority can be dynamic and facilitates a window to Bite (when running TOW+RF here).
This is partly achieved by RF not affected by BT, and the fact Rip can be overwritten with a weaker version.
However putting a lot of power in both PW (not affected by BT) and MA (affected by BT) would kind of revert this.
Ultimately point I’m making is maybe it’s time to just make PW affected by BT/LS too, and tune accordingly if needed. Unless you really want to shake things up here but I think maybe some consistency is easier for players. If MA doesn’t end up working with Apex, Biteweaving rules will become more prominent and keeping simple priorities like Rip snapshot > all regardless of Hero talents works well.
TF Catform
Guess question here is it worth adding another keybind to Feral when this otherwise wouldn’t take an extra keybind due to shapeshift actionbarpaging (or form specific macros), especially when so much QOL is added to Bear frenzied regens anyway.
That said I have no issue with it and no one else seems to care. As long as things like Renewal or anything else don’t get killed to add this then has no downside for me. But I can’t help but wonder what we might have been able to get instead of this (if we assume there’s a keybind budget)?
Last Things
Anyway tree looks good, Bear and healing nodes in the class tree are the most interesting of them all and this tree has a lot of synergies with them. Maybe hope to see even more shapeshifting stuff in the class tree too or at the very least nodes like Tireless Pursuit and what not becoming useful again.
Also please fix Rebirthing with Rage as non-Guardian as it’s been bugged for a long time now.
Also was going to mention Berserk capstone in this post but there’s no actual issues, looks fun with minor gameplay prioritising certain builders/using procs. Don’t think overwriting concerns here is egregious either because of the frequency of procs, if anything adds some nice urgency to try spend them quickly.
Given the other node also passively improves survivability (let alone lost survivability from shifting) it really depends what kind of performance you are chasing. It’d be rare to find any content, especially at the level of players here, where squeezing extra tank damage would ever feel mandatory. Especially given this is also a choice node within one of two choices of Hero trees. Most of your personal performance that people would care about, in say a M+ setting, would be related to whether you die or not (among other things like what pulls etc) instead of squeezing out more tank dmg.
For one they could open up both forms of Wildpower Surge to each spec so when you use Catform as Bear you build stacks for the Bear ability amp. Also opening up the bleed extension to Cat abilities.
This analogy is not it.
Your argument is either ‘it will be too strong or too weak’ is really not adding any insight and again you are so overly fixated with numbers that don’t exist yet. Restos tree problem is partly a result of a current, temporary tier set, and just because a problem exists for Resto currently, doesn’t mean it won’t be addressed in future.
You’re acting like this is impossible to tune, again over-fixation on numbers over gameplay.
Adding unnecessary keybinds to Bear, missing all the timing elements + risk/reward related to weaving, and synergy with shapeshift nodes.
Also what’s to say they just want to limit shifting only to Rips?
Heart of the Wild cat feels amazing since the rework, and different form Convokes were incredibly fun last xpac.
I don’t think that’s a bug. It’s part of the guardian passive.
Personally I hate long CDs. And for convoke to be a serious choice for bears, they’ll have to take it off if incarn. Looking at this in the context of today’s bears, the passive DR will be the meta choice for sure. But they could (and imho, should) move a ton of stuff around in the Druid and bear trees. It’s hard to gauge this without that necessary context.
So you’re banking on them fixing the entire tree to work with that talent and make additions to every talent in the tree to allow you to get off a rip for a bit of extra damage.
Because their track record is great on fixing druid trees.
Completely agree. Conv/Inc makes sense for some other Druid specs but certainly not Guardian and I don’t think they should follow what other specs are doing for some pointless consistency, especially when it’s in the spec tree.
Regardless the tooltip updates to Rage but the button just doesn’t do anything in Bearform for other specs. You have to cancelform first to Brez if in Bear form, that alone should be fixed because yeah the button is quite literally broken and does nothing.
Well for one every Druid spec tree has seen improvements through the xpac, including Guardian. Secondly yeah to some degree, that’s the point of feedback? Whether they deliver or not is out of our hands. There is also plenty of synergy already there or potential for it both within this Hero tree and class tree etc.
Any idiot can go press a Rip in catform as Guardian right now, add 50% to the number and say “it won’t be worth it”, you aren’t offering anything that people don’t already know and really that’s pretty much the extent to your insight in this thread. Like yeah no kidding they have to do more to support this, this is a pre-alpha preview, that’s why people such as myself are posting this stuff, but the foundation already looks solid.
You are so fixated on gatekeeping weaving (again, choice node) yet also say things like you have no intention to play the spec. Go outside man the spec isn’t going to be ruined. You’re either devoid of empathy because you can’t seem to even remotely comprehend how others will find it fun, or you’re just being obtuse and flat out lying when you say things like it adds nothing interesting whatsoever to gameplay.
The spec (like every) needs to evolve and offer new things, all you really needed to say in this threads was “I really dislike weaving and Blizzard I hope you keep the alternative option viable” instead of 15 posts telling us how bad Rip is for Guardian right now and things along the lines of “I don’t find it fun and nobody else does” (again instantly disproven by all the great catweaving eras people look back on fondly). There’s probably a huge playerbase of classic players or people who will return for xpac launch that don’t even know about this yet but will love it when they see it.
Anyway let’s leave it now, I did not intend to be involved with this much Guardian discussion and I will once again add the disclaimer it is my off-spec so write off my opinions if you will but I look forward to pushing as Bear again at some stage with this tree.
Feral related.