Feral Changes

We will have to wait and see exactly what changes we have in store. Part of me is hoping that the reason why the description was so breif is because the gameplay change is so substansial that it will be covered when we see how the full kit hits the Alpha. I just want some people to keep things in mind about changes.

Feral has been a underwhelming assasination rogue for so long now, i have no clue why people are trying so hard to keep it the way it presently is. If you don’t accept changes it will forever be an unwanted spec with extremely low representation. Everyone wants to defend blood talons, being energy starved (i don’t understand how this is an enjoyable aspect), snapshotted bleeds… yet all ive seen on forums when people aren’t complaining about new expansion changes is how feral is bad and just go play rogue. Everyone for some reason comes out of the woodwork when they make feral changes talking about how much they love the playstyle and whats the spec identity, when for everyone else the identity is always an underpreforming, overcomplicated, undesirable spec to bring in almost every scenario.

1) Blood Talons

this was only a thing since 6.0.1… why are people up in arms everytime they talk about changing this how its the most essential part for the spec feel. Everyone except the few vocal minorities hate it, and makes the spec impossible to balance in a good way with the way it works, which il go into detail on point 2.

2) Snapshots -

Why the hell do you care so much about this? Literally all it does is makes the spec needlessly unforgiving and convoluted, were the only DOT class still maintaining this “feature”. Instead of rip doing 200 damage per second, and rake doing 50… instead you have that as an artificial baseline, which they have to balance stupidly low because the expectation is your lining up your tigers fury, maintaining savage roar, and getting your blood talons on everything you’re applying these abilities on, to enourmously increase the damage which is what they actually balance balance around.

The defense is “i want to be rewarded for excecuting this”. So what your expectation is… blizzard will balance the spec for the baseline… then if you nail the execution you will be rewarded with 50% higher numbers… but it been shown again, and again expansion and patch that its not the case, and i can undertand why. They aren’t going to make us numerically overpowered just because were the most convoluted and hard to execute rotation.

Also…Why do you WANT to do all this extra fluff to increase Rip from 200 damage to 350, when Sin rogues just press a button to do 350 damage ruptures. You are basically begging to be gimped relative other dps spec median balance numbers.

3) Energy starvation (not wanting to be a spammy spec).

I see everyone anytime they have buffed momment of clarity or talked about increasing energy regeneration whine about not wanting to be a spammy spec. I don’t understand this. You don’t necessarily have to be a fury warrior APM to just have enough energy to apply your bleeds and not be terrified to use your combo points on something other than rip. Its also part of the reason that our AOE is very questionable, because throwing away energy on swipes is very unfavourable since we dont get more energy regen per DoTed target like rogues or do great aoe.

My point is… i see these same 3 key arguements and painpoints every time changes are brought up and “spec identity” but almost ALL of the things your fighting to keep are actually things that hurt our spec and viability. What IS feral good at? were told even by blizzard were not supposed to be good at AOE. In cleave fights due to whats listed above is pointlessly challenging to keep on par with other DOT classes that just press a non cd resourceless button for refreshes. Then even our single target is a overly convoluted assasination rogue. Lets stop making the “bleed” fanatasy being dollar assasination rogues… let them actually make feral not a overly convoluted mess. No one cares if you can manage all your resources and pool them perfectly in a pull… especially not all the groups that will continue to decline us because weve always been a meme spec for tryhard elitists that bring literally nothing to groups, that other similar DOT classes can offer with more consistancy and tools.

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I so wholeheartedly agree with your blood talons comment. It’s pure and simple not fun, though whenever you say that you get accused of being a casual and sucking. However, it’s just not fun to play with. Instead of asking them to keep in unfun BS and balance our class around it we should be calling Blizzard to do an actual rework that gives us new engaging tools to play with. Focusing on BT so hard will make it so our spec will never actually get changed!
The other two points I am indifferent too.
I don’t mind snapshotting and I don’t mind spammy or not spammy.

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If you go into the Feral Discord, where you know, the people who actually play this spec seriously and have devoted years to this spec, you will find blood talons and snapshotting has always been the core of Feral and the proposed BT change is overwhelmingly disliked. You are asking them to take away what makes the spec unique.

Look buddy you don’t need blood talons to farm your mounts or do your war campaign, how about you, a 427 ilvl druid who clearly doesn’t even play the spec, not give feedback for the rest of us. Because those of us who actually love the spec have a bitter taste in our mouth right now.

Feral is gimped, for the most part, simply because it doesn’t have utility like other specs. Particularly in contrast to Balance. Feral is not ‘gimped’ on damage right now (at the start of the xpac it was, due to poor balance, not class design). The game is melee heavy right now and Feral doesn’t bring anything unique besides stamp roar (which is now no longer unique). Damage wise we are very viable.

You are asking for a spammy, ‘priority-based’ melee spec? Like almost every other melee in the game? No, feral is unique because of snapshotting, because of smart energy pooling, because of ‘plates to spin.’

Also what are you on about our AOE is very questionable? Swiping is unfavourable? Mate you do realise swipe is so good that it’s better to use over shred even on a mere 2 targets (partly thanks to primal fury). Also look at the logs for ANY AOE fight in ny’alotha and you will see Feral AOE is in a good place, in fact overall we are performing higher than most melee (DPS wise).

Blizzard please don’t listen to these people who barely even play the game. They don’t even do mythic, THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE TO PICK BLOODTALONS FOR THE CONTENT THEY DO TO BE VIABLE. They can easily play MOC and only be slightly behind.

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Funny that, Bloodtalons is the reason I fell in love with Feral. If you don’t like Bloodtalons you could always try playing an Arms Warrior, you don’t even have to snapshot your bleed on that spec, it’s passively applied.

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curious how BT is the core of feral when its an optional talent…

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It has been in the game since 5.0 and always the must talent for almost all content. Even before that, snapshotting was still a massive part of Feral. Snapshotting has been the core of Feral forever, and BT (previously called Dream of Cenarius IIRC) has been around for countless xpacs.

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Why do you want to play feral? I mean clearly you don’t like it’s gameplay. Everything you just asked to be changed is what it makes it unique.

Feral being underrepresented isn’t because of how it plays. Everyone say go play rogue because of its utility, not because of its damage.

With this changes you propose you want to make feral a warrior that has the skin of a cat. You don’t have to like every class, that would be the best case, since it would mean each gameplay is unique.

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OP you literally described the core identity of Feral gameplay perfectly and then asked why people play it. It’s because that’s how I like playing. I prefer my gameplay to focus around preparation and setup to get the perfect bleeds rather than just performing a priority rotation or a specific rotation execution.

I like having restrictions on when I can apply my bleeds for optimal benefit. The nice thing about having 12 classes is that you can change to whatever class suits your fancy. Don’t force Ferals to change just because you like playing Warrior.

Regarding energy, I think that’s a common complaint among newer Rogues and Ferals but most experienced players of those classes tend to fall into one camp: energy starvation is not a real thing. Energy classes have a 1.0s GCD. They will never be able to cast back to back on the GCD and that’s intentional. Unlike other classes where GCD cycles are their limiting factor, energy is ours. Managing that energy is a completely different style than GCD locked classes and it’s the style I prefer. I like alternating between periods of high activity and periods of low activity. I find that people who complain about energy starvation are usually trying to do too many Shred sequences when they should be preparing for the next round of bleeds.

Speaking of preparing for bleeds, I like how the emphasis for Feral is more on prep than it is in directly dealing damage. That’s why I like snapshot. I like watching my timers and making sure everything lines up to get the perfect bleed. I already have a WA to notify me when my bleeds are in pandemic. If there were no snapshots and no “energy starvation” requirements all I’d have to do is spam Shred and FB and refresh my bleeds when that WA yells at me. That doesn’t sound especially engaging to me and is by far something I want to avoid.

The worst thing they could do to BT is make it mindless and I would also prefer that it continued to interact with Rake to provide a restriction on when you can safely refresh that. I’ve played with OoC before and I don’t like how literally the only thing I worry about when Rake refreshing is the pandemic window.

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What are you talking about?! Rogue have been a a top 5 DPS spec for like 4+ years now. Yes the utility is icing on the cake but their damage certainly isn’t lacking and have for the most part been in a good place pvp since pretty much the dawn of time similar to mage.

I want to play feral because i like the diversity of the druid class, like being a shapeshifting lion, and like being a hybrid. I would much prefer the put the complexity behind that then being a gimped rogue because “thats our class identity since forever!” to be quite honest i was actually hopeful we would get a different resource than energy and combo points to make us a more unique DoT class.

I didn’t really propose any changes i stated that people need to stop being fixating on keeping those three aspects of the spec intact and untouched because its the core of the problem. I don’t see how asking to not be resource starved while also having a unforgiving playstyle turns us into a warrior?!

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We’re not a gimped Rogue. We have elements from all three Rogue specs in us but we focus a lot more on preparing our abilities to line up in order to refresh smoothly than say, Assassin does. In a way, we’re kind of marrying the DoT management of Assassin with the prepare-and-burst mindset of Subtlety. If anything, I always saw Feral as a melding between all the Rogue specs rather than being a watered down version of Rogue.

And I’ll say it again, energy starvation does not exist. Feeling energy starved is a symptom of poor energy management. If energy ever becomes so abundant that you no longer have to worry about pooling or energy management then you are no longer an energy class, you’re a 1.0s GCD locked class. Most of us came to energy classes explicitly to avoid that. Energy’s scarcity is what makes it work. You can’t take that away. Star becoming okay with doing nothing. If it helps, the clicker for me was shifting my Feral thinking away from GCDs and more towards energy. Think of the fight in terms of how much energy you get over the course of the fight since that’s a fixed number. How do I make a finite amount of energy do the most work possible? Once you think on that level, GCDs become irrelevant.

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sometimes they make changes for the people that dont play it now. the 5 of you that love bt are not enough to justify leaving it alone

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I’m okay with changing BT. Right now I’m more concerned than anything else since I think this is a very easy thing for Blizzard to screw up. The nice thing about BT is that OoC already exists and has been semi-competitive with BT for as long as I can remember. We’re in a unique situation where Feral can have its cake and eat it too.

My priority since reading this proposed change has been to make it clear what I think the important facets of BT are that should be preserved. Like I said, I don’t mind if they change BT so long as they keep the role of BT in the rotation the same and I don’t think convincing people who don’t like the core of Feral’s playstyle to play Feral should be our top priority for class changes.

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You are aware there is a middleground between unlimited energy and energy starvation. I even indicate in my post that im not even hoping for fury warrior APM here. There is a middle ground between being afraid to use energy / having huge downtime windows to pool and using a button off the gdc.

Keeping in mind im not saying i want this exact mechnic, (because it would just make us even closer to rogues) but they get nice QoL regeneration mechanics like the number of bleeds with poisions increase energy to basically scale your resource management to the amount of targets your fighting so their flow always feels good.

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they do think about stuff like this when the spec is under played. i know they cant please everyone, sometimes that means alienating casuals and sometimes die hards

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And we get Predator which means you’re basically casting on the GCD with full TF uptime in AOE.

I’m aware that there’s a middle ground, there’s no need to be snide. It’s a middle ground Feral traverses throughout the course of every expansion since I’ve played the spec at least. If you’re wearing current gear with current haste levels I actually struggle more now with keeping my energy from capping than I do with pooling properly during Ny’Alotha. And once Shadowlands starts up, we’ll go right back to the pooling focus since the haste values will have dropped down again. The cycle repeats with every expansion.

I read your post and I don’t agree with you that there’s a problem. So long as we have enough energy to maintain 100% uptime on our bleeds if we manage correctly then we have enough energy. I think what I might like to see from you is a better definition of what this middle ground looks like. Just saying “we don’t have enough of it” doesn’t really do a good job of communicating how much is too much or too little. Warrior is a bad point of comparison since they are the opposite end of the spectrum. There’s a wiiiiiiiide gulf between us so I think your argument could benefit from a bit more specificity.

Furthermore to this, in legion they buffed MoC to actually be very very competative with BT, and then nerfed it in BFA and the feral mini rework. The reason they did this… is because after buffing it and giving people the option to play a competative non BT build… every single BT supporter came here to cry about how its bull it is that mashing ferocious bite is giving the same damage output as picking the most complex snapshot talents that are alot harder to execute.

To be clear, there was a build where you could take 3 talets that devolved the spec into 3 buttons and using something off the GCD which was a bit much for me… but it was an option nonetheless that got canned because of complaints.

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Can we just teleport back to wrath where ferals were gods and everyone can be happy? : smile : we had mangle, SR, and dots to manage, faerie fire, and snapshotting was still a thing but in the form of buff/proc/consume management. Beserk was actually not dog doo doo. still had the ability to clutch fights with some off healing or swapping into tank form when your Main tank died…
you could actually powershift. You brought a bleed debuff, armor reduction, and 5% crit to physical dmg dealers in your raid… you know actual reasons to be invited to content.

I get the game’s fundamentally changed since wrath days, but the changes need for feral were things that were all available back then. We brought a lot to a raid group to make us desired to a raid. Faerie Fire Feral was off ocd and didn’t cost us resources to keep up compared to healing and boomkin counterparts, mangle was an essential only alternative being provided by an arms spec’d warrior increasing all physical DoTs, Innervate was an amazing recovery tool, LoTP and Improved LoTP were great utility, 5% crit for physical dmg, and let ppl get some passive healing from their crits.

None of these things were completely manditory, but they were a great boon to the raid when they were there, and they gave ferals a unique spot in the raid. They were still interesting, fun, and challenging to play… but when you brought a good feral your entire raid was rewarded and it was worth giving them a spot. Unlike now, they’re extremely unforgiving and there’s 0 benefits of having them in your raid. I like challenging and rewarding, just don’t make me feel like I’m holding back my entire raid for wanting to play the spec/class I enjoy, because lets be real, the majority of dps specs are braindead simple.

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WHAT?! lol the only reason i brought up warrior was because you were the one in your original post that stated that you wan’t energy downtimes, and anything else would turn us into warrior lol.

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For what it’s worth, I actually agree that MoC should be comparable to BT . I think it’s good to have an easier, viable option for people who don’t want to learn to master BT. It’s why I won’t advocate for BT becoming baseline. I’ve recommended many Ferals take MoC because they perform better with it.

I just ran a quick sim on my own character comparing BT to MoC, I think it’s appropriate for BT to be better since I think proper management of active abilities should always be more rewarding than passive benefits but I don’t think it’s as bad as you seem to claim it is. The sim shows 72.1k DPS with BT and 70.6k DPS with MoC. That sounds reasonable to me. MoC is still a very viable option for people who don’t want to use BT. That’s true today, right now. You don’t need to be the top talent option to be viable.

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My dude… look at your OP. The first post in this thread.

Emphasis mine. Seriously. Calm down. If you’re not interested in an honest discussion then I don’t need to keep spending my time here.