Removing this from Feral is a terrible idea. The extra range on our attacks was one of the FEW things that made feral special and you’re taking it away. If you’re going to implement this change, then you need to increase the range of some of our abilities to compensate. For example, Thrash & Primal Wrath need to have that extra 3 yard range baked in.
This is especially frustrating as it is unlikely you’ll be nerfing the ability for Paladins to still do a significant amount of their damage at range.
I really hate this nerf 
What is inconsistent is the hitboxes of the enemies we are fighting. It is an extremely bad experience to have to melee dps from what “appears” to be inside the creature’s hitbox. Like, literally there are some creatures that I have to get so close to I can’t discern my character model from the mob. The classes that had the extended melee range might “…now allow specs to attack from well outside where it appears they should be able to” but what you don’t seem to understand is that it made for a MUCH better player experience, especially in M+, and especially when ability graphics are so dense, ground effects are so difficult to see, and frontals are so critical to dodge.
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Not that I think it’s that dramatic, I would like to express similar dissatisfaction. If they want to do this with paladins and rogues, then by all means. But the hitbox on elongated feral model has been for a long time more onerous to work with when it comes to melee range requirements. This and the prior balance affinity made it not feel outright bad to play.
Consider the difference in 4 legs and 2 legs with this change.
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Don’t know if you saw my reply on the other post here, but take Primal Wrath for example.
Primal Wrath
Live: 14 yards
TWW: 8 yards
That’s almost half the range it was. That’s a bit much.
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For context, that’s mage spells going from 40 yards to 22.
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They’re gutting the melee attack range talents in TWW, and that’s a healthy thing from a PVP perspective. PVE its a QOL thing to have. It’s also worth mentioning that this is also a fault of the terrible druid class tree.
This however, should just be a base increase to the abilities, rather than a base thing for melee range.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that rets need to be labeled as a melee class, and stay as a melee class.
Not all melee got the melee attack range talents. These are the inconsistencies that they mean.
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I know what inconsistencies they were talking about - I was pointing out that they should clean their own house up before messing about it ours (I know technically the whole game is their house, just couldn’t think of a different way to put that).
Idk they need to just balance melee across the board first (remove ret range) and work down from there. All are melee or none are melee. Simple as that gets.
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I read the redux change they are talking about and slowly over time its been cut down. From 5 to 3 to “must be inside of the mob” I agree all the melee get it or give Feral back its 5 yrds.
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Meanwhile paladins are atacking from other side of the map, and now they can rain Hammers, blizz just need tbh and delete feral, they want us to be boomie
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This is a change that would be insanely popular for them to backtrack on.
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They added the additional range to Feral because the cat model made melee awkward. Did they fix that or are we looking at a new team of devs making old mistakes over again?
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My concern is with the fact Feral consistently is one of the worst specs when it comes to death statistics. I can accept the changes, but just hope the defensive improvements with the spec tree changes and Hero trees are enough to compensate, as being forced to play closer while not being passively tanky or being able to immune/cheat death things is concerning.
This is a decent point, cat model can be a tiny bit awkward for ultra-precise positioning.
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How much do you think Druid of the Claw will help with survival. If we are popping over to bear for 1/4 of the time and ironfur and regeneration carry over it should help.
To give a historical perspective on why they gave feral the extra range. When the druid class was first created at the end of Vanilla Beta, they used a large hit-box for both bear and cat. This hit box, in order to attack things was located in the rear end of the model. What this meant was that in order for you, the player, to hit anything, you had to plant the face of your model firmly inside the rear of the thing you were attacking. The sad thing though, it did not reciprocate. So, you could not hit a mob if standing face to face, you had to be inside the mob in order to do so. The mob on the other hand, yeah about that. This went live, and to this day, is STILL like that.
Fun fact, the reason my Blizzard created the warebear and wearcat forms was to alleviate this problem as it was a standup model with the same hit-box as everything else in the game. Think I am lying, there are numerous YouTube videos made about this issue before they added the extended attack range of the ferals (and a lesser extent Guardians). It used to drive ferals absolutely bonkers in PVP because you couldn’t hit your target without getting the out-of-range crap, but people could decimate you.
Now, they are removing the band-aide they put on the spec. However, that being said, that wonderful BS Blizzard put on cat and bear, is going to rear its ugly head again given their shotty development person/team for the affected spec. I have absolutely no confidence, in that whoever is working on the class spec, is going to address this issue till well after the expac drops, and then it will be “when I/we get around to it only if the ferals complain loud enough”.
Of course the try-hards and white knights will say there was never ever a problem with feral hitboxes to begin with …
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They’re reducing range extensions for all melee classes, including rets which people keep mentioning. This isn’t only druid. My opinion, it also needs to happen as the amount of range increases for melee has gotten out of hand. Of course everyone is going to say their class/spec is the special snowflake that should keep it.
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Ret is only getting some of their range reduced. They will still have the Jurisdiction talent.
Actually, in the case of feral, it was a band-aid fix to the cat/bear model issue. Stripping the distance takes us back 5-6 years. This is not a “snowflake” issue when it comes to feral. It was actually a fix because ferals do not have a standard hit box (the only way we could have one, was through the glyphing system at the time that allowed us to have a stand-up kitty form… or better yet, all the ferals that used to run noggenfoggers when playing because it “fixed” blizzard’s garbage coding). As I stated in another post, there are videos from “back-in-the -day” where it was demonstrated the issue was real. And it took blizzard 14 years from release, stupid amounts of video proof, and the druid community finally agreeing on something universally, to give us a band-aid. Only to strip it for the expac.
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Yeah, Get ready to have to stick your head in some of the bigger mobs to actually hit them. Raiding ferals are in for a very very bad time.
On the plus side, with social media as prevalent as it is now it shouldnt take too many ridiculous videos of how bad the hit boxes are for feral before they reverse this bad decision.
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I made a thread about melee attack range based off of the article you are quoting in the paladin forums and I am happy to see other people talking about melee range, feral specifically here.
If melee don’t have uptime, what’s the point of bringing melee when ranged can side step and keep on attacking?
This gets worse when as OP mentioned, the hitboxes aren’t consistent. Some bosses, you can be “swiping/attacking at air” and others, your face is buried into part of the model where you can’t see anything.
I think giving all melee 4-6 yards on all their attacks across the board would be fair. You’re still in melee and you aren’t in outer space.
The article mentioned all melee with ranged increases will be brought in, so the paladins dpsing out near Pluto should also feel the burn. Rogues as well.
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Yet another example of the devs “fixing” a nonexistent problem with Feral
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