But we are not rogues. Our gameplay shouldn’t be that of a rogue. We are ferals, we always had a different playstyle. Yeah I want to have a lay on hands also, because we cn heal. Or maybe a pet since we are druids and strong related with nature.
Each class should feel different. Unique.
totally agree. Seems like it’s really straightforward to just balance talents to have viable builds without bloodtalons/snapshotting, and preserve bloodtalons for those who enjoy it. i think you hit the nail on the head that there’s a unique style for druids that yes, few classes still have, but also is OPTIONAL for feral with viable alternatives.
For all of the tweaking feral could use, re-working a talent that some players like instead of just preserving viable alternatives feels like a waste of time
Holy crud so much this lol… Im horde but in BFA switched partway through to alliance Palidin, was about to level a KulTiran druid cause i think their forms look amazing… then im like wait… i cant pass up shadowmeld as a vanish… Looks like were going back to horde anyways but it would certianly be nice.
Please explain to me how having a baseline vanish for feral would suddenly make feral and rogue gameplay similar, when currently we can already re-enter stealth in combat by taking Incarnation.
What this does is improving feral’s baseline utility with their stealth without being forced to take a specific talent.
Lol but this is untrue… we have from the dawn of WOW been welfare rogues. We literally have directly comparable main abilities and main objective is to keep up our spender and builder bleeds on as many targets as much as possible:
So aside from both missing a TON of other things rogues have like vanish, amazing defensives, better regeneration, poisions with utility… we literally have worse and more convoluted versions of everything that is a assasination rogue… hell our healing isnt even as convenient or good as theirs anymore and were “hybrid”. You can’t honestly ignore all these clear correlations lol.
TBH part of what i was saying is i would be fine if they gave us an entirely new resource than energy and combo points. I don’t want them to necessarily be rogues … but want them to break out of being worse rogues.
To Bloodtalons
cyclone and cheapshot doesn’t work like that
I think what he meant was Pounce, the old feral-copy of Cheapshot.
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Pounce
They finally removed the spell and incorporated into Rake, which imho, one of the few great feral improvement being done over the years.
Feral and rogue doesn’t have the same gameplay. Just because we have cp and energy doesn’t mean it’s the same.
It has some similarities yes, but it’s the interaction between those abilities that marks a difference. And if you have played both classes you’d see the difference. And that is a huge problem to ferals, because aLot of people think rogues and feral play the same. That idea is why we defend snapshotting, since that is a huge difference between those 2.
Now just please don’t think about numbers or just this expansion for the following things (since this expansion made no sense with bleeds doing no damage on pvp, and the toolkit being so different between these 2).
Rogue gameplay is about using your stealth as a way to disable your opponent and outwitting him knowing you can’t handle a trade of damage. If a warrior starts hitting you, you should be worried since you shouldn’t be able to survive, therefore you have to use your toolkit to slow him, blind him, stun him or vanishing. The fact that this isn’t true with all this massive defensive tools rogue have is a mistake on rogues design. Having cheat death, cloak, feint, and evasion are too op that’s why is so popular right now.
Now feral idea should be a predator on the opening. Surprising his enemy and dealing a lot of bleed damage from its claws. And why not re entering stealth again? Because we are druids. Our fantasy is that we shapeshift so after that bleed damage ripping our enemy, we can kite using our mobility and roots, or change into bear to withstand some hits.
Rogues vanish cause it fits its fantasy. We have shape-shifting and for this and that’s our gameplay.
I know this isn’t true on paper since our survival toolkit is way worst than rogues but as I said that’s number balancing issues. From a gameplay point of view we should depend on our other forms to survive and perform not on the gameplay of a rogue.
I hope you can understand what I mean but I’ll try to rephrase it in case not
Sorry maybe i meant blind? Either way… the one that incompacitates people until broken.
I think ultimately Feral’s issues are we tend to get wrapped up in an internal debate on I like X playstyle and I like Y playstyle. This debate doesn’t really solve the core issue I see which is the appeal of the spec to the broad community. What do we do that is unique and/or desirable in a group/raid?
Over the years we have lost:
When we look at Bloodtalons and the proposed changes it raises questions on the impact to say Sabertooth as a talent. We only apply Rip infrequently now because of that talent so limiting Bloodtalons to just Rip means this will change so I expect to see more changes for us.
Yes, casting a heal is counter-intuitive as a melee DPS in a rotation and I personally am meh on the appeal of this talent but I run it anyway. They should have looked at how they can enable BT to benefit the raid/group more readily than just a raw DPS increase to one ability. Why not enable some kind of smart heal that helps the group without me having to use a mouse-over macro (reverse Blood DK heal the raid not yourself)? I try to heal others but paying attention to not just my rotation/bleeds but the health of my group/raid to make effective use of this heal is cumbersome.
I’m certainly not the player I used to be in terms of ranking or raiding, just a lot going on. I play Feral because of the fantasy of the class+spec and I am not bothered by the play style frustrations (BT) enough to not find joy in being a Druid who has rogue-like capabilities (I was a Druid in EQ and a Swashbuckler in EQ2).
We have lost a lot over the years as not just a class but also our spec, is the focus on BTs really solving anything to improve our image in the greater community? Is the learning curve and difference between MoC so great that it still damages our image due to those who struggle to master it doing poorly? I just don’t think so, we need to get back some things we have lost and find out how we can bring utility and appeal to drive an interest in having a Feral around.
Dude… if you want to tell me that after i listed all those very very obvious comparisions that make them the same you are beyond trying to convince and get out of your denial. We can ignore numbers, we can even ignore what buttons are being pressed. The end of the day:
Assination rogues and feral Druids have the same fundemental combat objectives. To maintain your 2 bleeds / poisons on as many targets as possible with energy and combo points as a melee DoT class. One of them is just much more convoluted and difficult to obtain this result without the extra perks i just listed. If you can’t see this im sorry but your blind. You just listed general Rogue class fantasy, if anything you described subtley rogue, not assasination rogues reality and gameplay.
Well it’s clearly you don’t play neither of them outside of world quests or lfr then if you think they are the same.
Balance, elemental shaman, frost mage and destro warlock are the same also right? I mean they have this low hitting spells that build resources and then they spend it, right?
At least the other people trying to change feral play it outside of world content and quests.
Better question is why the heck is our description on upcoming updates so short and vague. Didn’t they do this same thing when BFA came out and look at how bad our spec was the first few months. This kitty is already starting to go into panic mode because they are about to screw us again…
Im relatively new to feral and I loved the BT and snapshotting as an interesting and challenging way to play a dps. Yeah, I get that it makes feral more of a niche spec, but wow doesnt need another ret pally that can do their rotation by falling asleep on their keyboard… I fundamentally just enjoy it
Bloodtalons and snapshotting are fun for me even though I dont even use it 90% of the time doing pvp.
Maybe instead of having to gut something people enjoy they could just buff moment and frenzy to be more competitive.
We’ve known that Bloodtalons was being looked at being changed since August 2018, after Seph had stated:
Bloodtalons does a great job at adding complexity to the rotation, but we’re not sure the method in which it does that is right for the spec long-term. Bloodtalons asks you to frequently cast a Regrowth in exchange for its buff, which in a group/raid, means either you’re required to keep an eye on group/raid frames (which is a lot to ask) or you make a macro to mindlessly cast Regrowth on yourself (which isn’t great).
Considering we’ve known for this amount of time that developers were looking into such changes, it’s extremely disingenuous to be at all surprised.
Similar scenario in Warlock’s Soul Effigy:
We hear you all on Soul Effigy. We’re going to remove it in the next PTR patch. It’s concerning when the community sentiment towards a talent isn’t that it’s overpowered or underpowered, but that everyone is terrified they’re going to have to play that way if it becomes strong.
The Dreamgrove was previously an echo chamber of confirmation bias for Bloodtalons. I would not put any faith into their ability to help steer the spec into a suitable direction until they actively recognise there’s a necessary shift away from current design. Especially considering their work toward Feral’s WoWHead guide which was unsuitable to the degree of providing inaccurate and out-of-date information, months after implementation, until later portions of the guide were then taken over by others in the WoWHead community (as the changelog clearly shows).
Now, this does not mean that players shouldn’t provide clear and accurate feedback in how the new Bloodtalons is implemented, but I am unfortunately expecting hyperbole and a refusal to move past this change into a much needed direction. Know that Bloodtalons has changed, and likely not to return in it’s current form, as we need to do our best in helping the development team in feedback and testing for an enjoyable substitute.
Personally i dont feel current bloodtalon is much about complexity at all. It is just a completely unlogical playstyle. “press this short cd selfbuff before each finisher”. Some people having made it a habbit still doesnt make it good… AT ALL. The new refurbished Bloodtalons actually makes you have to think about what you are doing. (What to use depending on crits on builders.)
And i also got a feeling this non-sence of spamming regrowth is what makes the regrowth so exceptionally weak.
On some fights it feels really good to snapshot bleeds, some stuff just makes it feel unnecessarily punishing. I don’t want it to go away, but the risk vs reward really isn’t there when every other class doesn’t have to bother, and gets better utility while having less punishing rotations and set ups.
There really isn’t a nice clean solution for this. In theory it should be risk vs reward, and other classes should also have similar options. But they don’t, and the game is balanced around optimal play to avoid outliers. So either they make it that the reward is so negligible that it doesn’t matter, or the rest of the feral talent builds are massively underpowered because this is just sitting there as an outlier they are using to balance against other classes.
I do wonder - If they could truly balance the talent choices to be equal DPS, how many people would actually still play with bloodtalons if it offered no numerical advantage, just because it was fun?
If they bring back risk vs reward, it needs to be across the board for all classes. Otherwise BT is just going to keep gimping every other Feral build.
No, not really, not even close, get to max energy and do the 3 ability combo, same thing but a whole lot less rewarding.
It’s awful, only affects a single ability, it will backfire and it will take another entire tier for blizzard to make ferals do higher dmg than tanks just like in Uldir.
The only reason current BT is not complex is because current bleed duration is too long and that garbage talent called Sabretooth exists, which it shouldn’t.
It was fine in MoP when full snapshot existed and it was fine when jagged Wounds existed, but Blizzard loves to keep destroying functional feral iterations, now the current one might not be amazing but it has potential and now I’m getting that looming WoD pre-patch blunder of the century vibe.
Update… the changes have been datamined… and they are hilarious lol. So the short blurb is exactly what it sounded like, using shred rake and fercious bite will empower your next rip by 100% if done within 3 seconds. I’m indiffernet to this change. What i do find absoloutely stunning is they actually took away a bunch of stuff haha. We lost survival instincts, and also typhoon (granted we will probbably still go balance afinnity and get it).
Unbeleivable… The expansion that they are supposed to be giving tools to fix class utility and flexibility and we get nothing and get things taken away. The only plus side i will say… is Heart of the wild is back, which DOES give us a niche of being able to breifly offheal / offtank. I will give them credit that its some flavour but not what most DPS are looking for and likely not what most groups are looking for when filling a DPS slot for a raid or M+ group.