Feral Druid has long struggled with popularity, and it often feels like one of the least wanted specs in the game. One major reason? No visible transmog. While other classes get to show off their gear, Druids are stuck in the same outdated animal forms—Cat, Bear, and now Owlbear.
Customization is a huge part of WoW’s appeal, yet Feral players don’t get to enjoy it. A possible solution? Give Druids a “standing form”—something similar to Worgen or Dracthyr—where we can see our shoulders, feet, hands, and back transmogs while still keeping a feral, nature-infused aesthetic.
The lore already supports this idea! The “Druids of the Forbidden Pack” storyline could be used to introduce a new hybrid transformation that lets Feral players finally feel more unique and visually engaging.
Right now, Feral feels outdated and underappreciated. Adding more customization options could make the spec more exciting and bring more players to the class. What do you think? Should Blizzard finally give Feral Druids a fresh look?
Feral is just rarely competitive DPS wise to other melee. Very few reasons to take a feral unless they’re giga broken, because other melee will be able to do the single target & cleave damage simpler. At a casual level, it won’t matter and you can argue customization is the reason, but the reality is that casual or hardcore, feral is a more complex melee than possibly every other melee in the game.
Moonkin is one of the most popular specs every season. Guardian is played when it’s good for the season, as would resto during times when it had to run tree of life.
The lack of transmog might contribute to feral’s lack of popularity, but given none of the other specs are as unpopular despite having similar transmog limitations, I think it’s a vast overstatement to say that’s a major reason. I wouldn’t turn down more appearance options, but I don’t think that would realistically do much to feral pick rates.
For M+, sure. But this is just not accurate for raid. In recent raid tiers, feral is consistently top 5 in boss damage. There have been seasons where feral was comfortably the top boss damage spec in the game, and still was never picked. And then even in DF S1 when feral had a near 100% MDI pick rate, it was a break the meta spec.
Yes, most times feral isn’t so much better than other options to be deemed a must have. But that statement in and of itself implies there is more to its low pick rate than just struggling to perform. At this point, it’s pretty clear the play style just doesn’t resonate with enough players to garner a higher pick rate.
This reinforces what I said. If it’s strong, it’s not like you can’t take it. There’s a reason feral wasn’t taken to RWF raiding since the Helya raid (forgetting name atm) until Amirdrassil. It was just crazy strong that tier, but everything before it was simply putting too much work for something that you could just sub in a different melee for a better result.
This is related to the complexity. What does feral do that other melee simply don’t do easier. Want cleave? Throw in a fdk, fury, enh, etc… Want ST? Throw in arms warrior, fury, unholy, enh, ret. The rotations just simply become easier, not as manageable around proc responding and reliance on bleeds. Feral mains are always going to find feral easy, but to reroll into feral is not as easy as rerolling into boomy. There’s also always going to be the complexity of having 2 DPS specs they can choose from, with boomy being an alternative. While boomy lacks defensively, and can definently lack in single target, it makes up for with its utility & much simpler gameplay loop.
I highly disagree, players will reroll to whatever is the easiest to do things with, as we very clearly saw with the augvoker meta in DFs2. Players simply don’t want to have to swap to a class with more complexity when the alternatives can just be 2 min go timers spamming 1 or 2 buttons. Dot management may not be ideal for every player, but if it’s the absolute best by a wide margin, everyone will flock to it.
Without defining “wide margin” it’s hard to really assess this statement. There have been times when feral druid was the number 1 DPS on boss damage by a sizeable margin, yet still wasn’t very popular in raid. And it was lapping the other DPS specs that were brought during DF S1 in M+.
Sure, perhaps the gaps in these seasons haven’t been “wide enough” for players to justify giving up a 2 button spec. But that’s adding wrinkles to beyond your initial statement of feral being rarely competitive. There have definitely been seasons where feral wasn’t competitive, but even the seasons when it is competitive, it still wasn’t brought. Whatever combination of reasons, people just don’t bring feral even when it can compete.
Historically Feral has overall been a worse choise than most other melee. So during the few, random, & short periods of greatness people believe/know it wont last for long so they wont get invested into feral.
It takes a long time for community perception to change unless the current state of things is so blatantly tilted that it’s completely undeniable.
It doesn’t help that most people don’t play multiple classes, so their perspectives are limited to the class they know. Then bias comes into play and it becomes a bloody mess.
While this is a valid point, there’s still something that we’re missing. With how quickly players can prepare a new character in modern WoW, even if feral became crap the next season, they won’t have put much time into getting it up to speed for that season. That’s why we see so many FOTM rerollers every tier; the cost to flock to the cool new toy is not very high.
To go one step further, over the past few years, we’ve seen players flocks to other traditionally unpopular specs when they got juiced to high heavens. It would be one thing if people were just bouncing from one popular spec to another. But we’ve seen people jump on windwalker monk, survival hunter, affliction warlock, and arcane mage in over the past several raid tiers as they each found their way to some of the better tuned specs for a season.
That’s why I think it’s more than just performance and the risk of a spec becoming useless a season later. Players have shown they’ll pick up most other high performing specs for a season despite them having historically been bad. I’m certain this is playing a role for feral, it just feels like we don’t have the whole story.
In Feral’s case, the conversations I’ve followed over the years have typically been a blend of:
-It’s a melee, there are better/more versatile/necessary melee and people can pick up a different spec of Druid for their buff and brez as needed
-Tacked onto the above, Feral has a distinct lack of unique utility from the other three specs
-It has history as being a janky or harder to play spec with little payoff for that versus Balance
Yeah this is a problem most raid tiers, to be sure. If we hadn’t seen windwalker and survival hunter fairly recently get raid slots, I’d be more inclined to think this was a bigger reason.
Historically this has been true, but since DF it hasn’t, at least in a raid context. That’s part of the reason why feral found its way into end bosses for RWF rather than the other druid specs during Amirdrassil whenever all druid specs were bad for RWF. There haven’t been any raids where feral was a slam dunk since DF like it was in some tiers before that though, so it hasn’t been obvious teams should bring a feral for that utility parity to make any real difference.
This is probably the main culprit. Unless feral is so much ahead of the pack to make learning a spec that many seemingly do not enjoy and/or is more punishing to play, it certainly makes sense for most raids to choose one of the close alternatives they will enjoy and take less time to figure out.
bruh, if you are playing a druid in general you aren’t going to be having visible transmog for long. Transmog ain’t part of the equation here as a basis of the class won’t be seen outside of a form outside of cities/rp.
Personally, I don’t like feral because it seems like a worse version of Guardian.
Edit: And to clarify, when I say worse version I don’t mean less powerful or anything.
Just that everything feral can do, guardian can do with higher survivability. So to me it just seems like a worse version.
Well besides the mog issue, its because Feral starts with “F”. F is clearly the indicator for failure. So Feral = Failure. 98% of it is from the mog issue though, for sure. But that 2%…F for failure. Cant be coincidence