Is this a late April Fool’s joke? How are these the only changes for feral after the state it’s been in for most of two consecutive expansions? Four years of complaining and we get one line of changes involving blood talons LOL
Here’s an idea: leader of the pack baseline pve, damage boost for x seconds upon going into bear form the first time within y seconds, higher regrowth/rejuv scaling with agility, replace ironfur with magic mitigation pvp
Here’s a better idea.
Relax.
This is early early alpha, there are months and months of changes to come.
While I do agree that Feral still requires substantial change, I’d absolutely recommend viewing streams, and testing before flipping out on a build’s incomplete datamining.
Now is the time for feedback, and Feral is absolutely in a place where it can improve. Just chill before flipping tables, and lay out exactly what you feel in needed before any such rants.
I absolutely agree that added utility and enjoyable playstyles are needed for any future of the spec, though we need accurate feedback without emotional hyperbole.
From the interview today with the game director:
There aren’t any huge sets of class changes that have been held back for future release.
The utility part sticks out most keenly in my mind. Right now if you directly compare Balance utility to Feral Utility, the Balance can do everything the Feral can (including not having to shift forms for things like Rebirth) as well as also having access to Innervate. Changing many of the Druid spells to be global Druid is all well and good, but it the process we took away Feral’s unique utility. We need to reconsider that.
Slightly unrelated but going from one of the best defensives in SI to easily the worst in Barkskin is going to be extremely jarring. When Shamans had a similarly powered defensive in Astral Shift it got buffed to 40% and they wear mail instead of leather. If it was too weak for Shamans it’s too weak for us. Right now when you look at DH’s Blur or the Rogue’s massive defensive kit ours is uniquely bad for a leather-wearer. If this is a push to make Bear Form our go to defensive I can’t say I like it since Bear Form doesn’t save me much from magic damage since the health increase isn’t that large for Feral, and doing so causes me to stop doing my Feral DPS. Something no other defensive has to deal with.
I think it would be wise to give feral leader of the pack in some form of slightly nerfed state. Enhance has windfury totem back (not sure how long that will last though), why can’t feral get something to GUARANTEE a raid spot? Even if its say 3% crit chance increase vice 5%? Or even a 2% might be enouhg to guarantee you a raid spot.
And so it begins…
“Its only alpha, calm down”
“Its only beta, calm down”
“Its only prepatch, wait for number tuning”
“Its only launch, wait for them to see us in action”
“Wait for 9.1, we’ll get fixed”
“Wait till next expac, they’ll fix us then. You should have said something earlier”
lol
What significant changes have they made to the game past alpha/beta anyway? Beta forums are useless, they rarely change anything even with months of being warned. It makes it to live and they hotfix it.
That being said, feral wasn’t too bad in the final patch of Legion was it? It might have been braindead but brutal slash wasn’t horrible.
I noticed balance has a alpha tester with a keen eye for details, balance and numbers. Does feral have a serious alpha tester?..whithout a too masive bias towards BT (in its current form or the change)?
If you find one let me know. Balance players outnumber Ferals significantly and unfortunately that also means they get the lion’s share of experts as well. Want an example of this? Check out the official thread for Alpha Shadowlands Druid feedback. Nuttin but Balance all the way down. (A lack of diversity in our experts also contributes to the Feral echo-chamber effect you’ve mentioned too.) Sometimes I feel like the reason so much Feral feedback falls on deaf ears is simply because there aren’t enough of us to make a loud enough sound to attract Blizzard’s attention.
It’ll be difficult to find such an expert with absolutely no priors with regards to BT though. Given that it’s such a defining part of the current Feral build it would be impossible for an expert to be able to ignore it or have no feelings about it. Since it’s the only line we get for changes in Shadowlands and thanks to it’s dominant role in defining the shape of the spec the Bloodtalons discussion is going to be an impossible one to ignore.
People would calm down if blizz had a sensible track record but when it comes to feral they continually fail.
Feral was good in the final patch of legion cause when nighthold came out they did massive changes to the spec and they had to do it again in BFA. By the time they did feral already had a stigma stuck to it.
There are already memes of feral from these patch notes. Feral now brings next to nothing to groups or raids with stampeding roar being baseline literally no reason to bring one now. I’m surprised blizzard hasn’t sat down and said, what would make you consider taking a feral. Right now there is quite literally nothing.
The fact that Feral is already being mocked in an expansion that hasn’t come out yet, I don’t even have the words the entire wow community sees feral as garbage and blizz apparently doesn’t. They either don’t care or flat out know nothing about the spec.
Yes its early alpha but they have continually failed for the feral spec too many times for anybody to have any confidence in them.
I can’t speak to feral rotation (haven’t raided as cat since burning crusade), but I did roll in bunch of feral utility concerns to my guardian posts, since a lot of it is common between bear/cat. At a minimum, you guys should have Cyclone on the Predatory Swiftness spell list, and have Rebirth castable in cat form again.
One improvement I was wanting to post (but I cant because I dont have alpha) is when ferals take Brutal Slash, that leaves their bear form with almost nothing to use. This is a big middle finger in pvp because others will know their not in any danger. Baseline swipe is taken away and that’s a primary filler for downtime. You’re literally sitting there doing nothing after mangle and Thrash.
Well…i had to play balance in BFA to participate in anything fun (for me). So I failed being a feral this expansion 
And i believe alot of druids have it the same way. So the numbers of druids who really want to play feral is much higher than blizzard might believe.
I think i might have failed to see anyone mention Survival Instincts being removed? If so ill mention it again. Every other melee has way more defensives than us some even along side immunities. With Survival Insticts being removed it is not worth switching to bear for for multiple gcds and back just for an amour increase. In our current state much less will be mythic raiding as feral just because of this alone not to mention other nerfs or lack of unique utilities now that every other druid spec has our one unique trait along side other utilities that we didnt get.
Blizz should take a look at RaiderIO, ask why is DH, rogue , mage at the top and then try to improve other classes, so they can also compete.
I saw a rather lengthy and pretty high quality post on SI in the official alpha feedback thread. I’ve seen the lack of utility issue mentioned there as well. At this point the only Feral hot-button topic I haven’t seen there is the Bloodtalons one, which for me is the top-tier issue.
I remember when I thought this had merit during BfA alpha 
I’m surprised Berserk received no changes, not even being taken off the GCD.
I’d have to play around with the new Bloodtalons to get a feel to it, but I’m generally opposed to mechanics that encourage even more Bite spam and less energy management.
I’m not. There was a very consistent pattern at the time of the GCD purge with all the long-CD throughput spells being put on the GCD for everyone. I didn’t expect any of them to make it back off the GCD without all of them coming off so I didn’t expect it to come off from a design standpoint. Even when I was helping to fight for Tiger’s Fury coming back off the GCD I approached it more from the energy gain standpoint than the throughput increase standpoint.
The decision itself is questionable, but Berserk specifically offers very little oomph compared to other major cooldowns, and triggering the GCD already shoves off a noticable chunk of its duration since it only lasts 15 seconds. Combustion got taken off the GCD for what I assume was a similar reason.
It’s more than 15 isn’t it? I know it definitely lasts longer than the TF whenever I stack them though I’ll confess I don’t remember exactly how long it is.
But I won’t argue it’s low impact compared to other throughput cooldowns. Mostly because I don’t want to be a liar. I was mostly saying that at the time of the GCD purge I really only fought the battles I thought we could win. (And we did win the TF one. 
)