Feral Druid Adjustments Coming Soon - April 3rd 2023

[Thatchdawg-benediction]

I was referring to all of the weird classes on warcraftlogs like warden, lichborne, etc. Either way still a bad number.

[Kíí-myzrael]

Yup agreeing with you, just adding that it’s even worse than you said. Over the last two weeks at least from wcl aggregate tank data.

[Sigismund-pagle]

I can’t speak for the other #somechanges people, but I’m pleased with this change, it’s in line with what I wanted for Classic in general. Small tweaks to keep the lowest performing classes functional but not better than average.

[Ziryus-pagle]

@Thatchdawg-benediction

This change makes me extremely sad as a dedicated feral player, so I’ll make my first forum post in the 15+ years I’ve been playing wow in an effort to explain why. I don’t understand the reasoning behind the change, and it appears to be specifically designed to take the most fun, flavorful, and unique parts out of the feral dps rotation.

If I wanted a slightly simpler energy based class, I’d play a combat rogue. If I wanted a much simpler energy based class, I’d play an assassination rogue. If I wanted to do top dps, I’d play a death knight ,or a warlock, or one of the many, many other classes available that do more dps than feral. Sure, there are some players who struggle to do the rotation, and probably appreciate this change. But why do the most dedicated players of the spec have to suffer for it? Why is a spec that is mechanically complex and difficult to play a bad thing when so many other classes and specs exist? Why not just take all our abilities away and give us a button called “do damage” that plays the spec for me while you’re at it.

From a flavor perspective, what’s so wrong with a feral druid having to swap between animal forms to do its optimal damage. Seems to me that it fits the theme pretty well. It’s not like unholy death knight where a new strategy was discovered that outclasses all other specs by a large margin either, so why is feral not playing exactly like in 2008 such a bad thing? I could point out a list of other specs that didn’t play the same as in 2008 if you want.

If the goal was to buff feral by 5-10%, then just buff the damage numbers by 5-10%, or do something like with ret paladins that doesn’t impact the rotation. Though, Feral scales fairly well into ICC with armor penetration, so likely the representation of cat players would have risen naturally as the spec gets better over time.

If you wanted to make the spec a bit easier for newcomers without changing the optimal rotation much, you could make faerie fire cat do a bit of damage. You can give it the same criteria as the ret paladin ability change so it doesn’t affect pvp, but tuned in such a way that it’s still optimal to bearweave for skilled players. You could buff the natural shapeshifter talent to give an extra 1% crit in cat form, or a different talent that applies only to cat form damage. I’m sure there’s a solution out there that doesn’t change top end players’ rotation, these are just a couple of ideas I thought of while writing this post.

If you feel like feral dps players are being ignored/replaced in raiding, or suffering socially, why not take a look at feral tanks. On Warcraft Logs, they are brought three times less than the 2nd least common tank. This includes feral druids in the “warden” category too. Overall they make up about 4% of all tanks currently in Ulduar. The cat change seems pretty arbitrary in comparison.

It’s not even consistent with your own reasoning behind changes (besides just the commonly quoted “no more spec changes” principle). Here’s a fun quote from the ret paladin changes:

Goal – Don’t make massive mechanical changes to how Retribution plays. Hand of Reckoning is off the GCD and can easily be weaved in between other abilities without adding a lot of mechanical change to how the class plays now. We feel that this is a fairly low-impact solution to provide a bit more output for players that want to opt-into this Glyph.

And finally, threat issues. Fortunately, blessing of salvation exists and last time I checked, people tend to bring paladins to raid. Vigilance exists too, for those raids that run a prot warrior, which is fairly common when there’s no prot paladin tanking. Perhaps in the occasional 10-man raid without either of those, you’d have to suck it up and bearweave a little less to compensate, or flowerweave for a tiny decrease in dps for a massive reduction in threat.

I’m trying not to be an elitist here, as I understand many players with lower skill level benefit and like this change. But the numbers put up on the dps meter are not the only thing that matters when you’re playing a game for fun. And at the end of the day, I thought the spec was more fun when I did less dps but had a more engaging rotation. It was hard, and there were always ways to improve your dps by practicing and getting better rather than just getting better gear.

I know this is a wall of text, but I wanted to address every aspect of why I despise this change and hope that it will be reverted or replaced with some other, less impactful change that could keep all ferals happy.

TL:DR:
I wish they just left my spec alone rather than try and decide halfway through the expansion that my way of playing it was wrong. I’ve hated it in the past when they’ve done it with retail and I hate it now. I’m sure there are going to be people who disagree with this because they want feral to be the same difficulty and play style as rogues, but with an orange name rather than a yellow one. I’m also sure there will be people who don’t play the spec at all that want to weigh in with made up information that’s just wrong. Just stop at the ret buffs and leave my class alone.

There will always be unpopular dps specs, and it makes sense that the hardest to play is one of them. There will also be classes that do less damage than others, and while it sucks that one of them is mine, there’s always going to be at least some of them when balancing an asymmetrical game like WoW.

Stop being a battered victim. Flower weaving and bear weaving are not fun.

[Bunstock-atiesh]

Bearweaving does add a whole other dynamic to the game that I agree is very fun. I think it’s fitting to as feral to use multiple forms to do dmg.
Maximize DMG while managing threat is a dynamic that no other class has to face like like feral do with bearweaving… but in the end it only means that when the you need to manage your threat, you don’t get to maximize your DMG. AKA not being bale to bearweave cause of threat.
And that isn’t fun.
Pressing cower is not fun instead of producing combo points either.

Also you assume all the salvs can and will go to you as if locks or mages totally don’t need them either.

[Woopee-mankrik]

@Aggrend-1483

With this adjustment we expect that the best Feral DPS players in the world may expect somewhere between a 5% and 10% damage increase depending on the encounter

10% damage buff puts 99% feral in the top 3 on a bunch of fights. I get making it less jank, but how can you possibly argue against buffing the real underperformers when you’re giving such a significant buff a spec that isn’t even weak?

[Kathatova-pagle]

People are saying it’s actually that much, honestly i don’t see how unless they also tweaked OOC in the background. I guess I’ll get to try it out after work

[Yama-yojamba]

So the evidence that fury will be top, is 2 og charts, in which fury isn’t top in either? Should warrior be constrained to the least desirable class to be bought along to a raid with next to no utility and some of the weakest damage in the game, until they get a legendary in the last meaningful raid in the game because of some old charts that don’t even show it as the top performing class just because a bunch of people say, “fury scales well”, with 0 actual evidence.

[Coatrackhead-benediction]

@Thatchdawg-benediction

And finally, threat issues. Fortunately, blessing of salvation exists and last time I checked, people tend to bring paladins to raid.

I mean I’m glad I don’t have to waste a GCD using Salv on our feral druid anymore.

[Onivoker-zuljin]

The legendary isn’t what pushes them toward the top, its arp.

And warrior has been top for 2 expansions, they don’t need to be top top for a third, they’re doing fine.

[Nezzey-ashkandi]

buff warlocks

[Coatrackhead-benediction]

@Ziryus-pagle

Flower weaving and bear weaving are not fun.

I mean fun is subjective my guy. Just because you don’t find either of these enjoyable doesn’t mean that they don’t.

[Yama-yojamba]

ARP isn’t some magical stat that doubles warriors dmg output show me the Sim data showing warriors are going to be top in ICC.

[Onivoker-zuljin]

In what world? They’re middle to low in almost every fight, highest fight they have is something like ignis

[Coatrackhead-benediction]

@Onivoker-zuljin

The legendary isn’t what pushes them toward the top, its arp.

More specifically ARP cap, which Smourne does help you achieve, but that doesn’t mean just having Smourne without the other pieces is going to get you to that point. Fury requires a lot of gear to be able to get to that point.

[Onivoker-zuljin]

Rough sim of Assassination vs Fury in Normal ICC gear with no Smourne has fury about 1k ahead

[Yama-yojamba]

Show us the Sim, and then show us the Sim for every other class in full bis too.

[Onivoker-zuljin]

Nah, you can do it yourself, that’s too much work.

Fury in just normal ICC gear was about 11.9k vs Assassination at 10.9k

Wasn’t even bis and I didn’t check for ArP cap

[Yama-yojamba]

So you just put a bunch of random gear on both and simmed it?

[Onivoker-zuljin]

No, I put normal bis on, not bis bis.