Feral Druid Dead Last in Raid DPS

Classes Druid
21

I wish. Hats off to those who have mastered feral, fire, elemental build enhancement, and arcane mage. I’ve tried them and have fallen short.

Edit: I forgot outlaw. That’s a room of spinning plates.

22

To be fair i cannot get behind mages. Its the one class i do not have.

But ive played Enhancement since Cata so that comes easy to me

23

I tried one of my free boosts on one back in cata…. Didn’t even make it past the tutorial part. Zzzzzzz

Boooring.

24

First off, cherry picking a couple fights is not a very useful way to prove the point you’re trying to make here.

But even beyond that, warcaft logs allows us to get statistics of the top performers across the specs rather than a straight average. Yes, there are a lot of feral players who are bad that will drag down the average. But when filtering on the 99th percentile, we see the same trend. Here are the logs for mythic on all bosses at the 99th percentile:

Feral druid and fire mage are the only specs that take the bottom for multiple bosses. Feral druid is in the bottom 5 specs across 6 of the 9 fights, with only beast mastery earning that distinction more often. Of the 3 fights feral is not bottom 5 on, it’s below balance druid on 2 of them (albeit just 1 spot away for Magmarox).

Not all ranking lists are some useless content creator tier lists based on their opinions. The ones I’m referencing are from the same warcraft logs where you pulled 2 specific bosses where one player is outperforming their local competition. When stacking the numbers across the entire site, as the ranking offered by warcraft logs does, it proves feral is in a bad spot. There are certainly other specs in a bad spot, but if you repeated this exercise over the past 10 raid tiers, I think you’d find feral is in an objectively bad spot more often than any other spec.

It’s not just about finding fun in the game, it’s about having fun while achieving your goals. When there is a perception that a spec is bad in raid tier after tier, more of the top and stepping stone guilds will not seek to recruit those positions. Yes, if you are just looking to smash some raid bosses with friends and family these things don’t matter. But if you really want to reach to the level of being able to get CE, or push world 1,000, world 100, or compete for RWF, that’s not something the vast majority of people have the skill set to do (logistically, even ignoring in game performance). For someone with these kinds of aspirations but who also wants to enjoy the game with a spec of their choosing, their options will be artificially limited by community perception of the spec.

Just finding a new guild that won’t bench you is only a viable response up to a certain level of performance. At a certain point, simply building your own guild that can compete with the established guilds for talents is prohibitively expensive (not necessarily money). If those guilds don’t consider your spec, it doesn’t matter if you have the skill to compete with them, they will never even read your application unless you reroll.

2 Likes
25

It never fails to impress me the lengths people will go to just to play the victim.

Unreal.

Are you playing with a guild whose entire roster parses in the 99th percentile?

Don’t bother answering that because we already know.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/VvFHQ7zXRgcdTyJZ#fight=24&type=damage-done

YOU :clap: ARE :clap: NOT :clap: THAT :clap: GUY

Grats on being at the top, by the way.
You’re clearly not the weakest link in youre guild. Cry some more.

….And yet there you are, completely unaffected by any of it.

1 Like
26

This is the thing you don’t get. Would you turn away any of those 3 Ferals from the logs I linked? Simply because a rankings list says they’re at the bottom? Or are you going to look at them as an individual and check their logs and see that they’re not going to be a hinderance to the raid team?

These are CE guilds, not smash bosses with friends and family guilds, that have Feral’s doing top end damage.

So now how does all of that fit in to:

By all accounts (well, your accounts), no CE guild should ever have a Feral in their roster.

27

To claim I am playing the victim is ridiculous. Nowhere did I say anything regarding my raid situation. Nowhere did I say I was being held back by feral’s relative position in raid performance. Grizzle cherry picked data from a couple fights that show the conclusion he wants to reach. Yet such an analysis is not a counterpoint to the OP’s concern.

Feral druid is measurably one of the worst performing specs in raid this tier. It has also been measurably one of the worst performing specs in nearly every raid tier going back a decade. The 99th percentile statistic is not an attempt to imply that your local competition will all be playing that well; it’s to demonstrate that the argument that too many bad players of a given spec drag the overall spec’s metrics down is not applicable in this case.

Nothing in what I said about the metrics or feral druid means anything about my level of enjoyment with my toon. Nowhere did I indicate that I was unable to achieve my goals with raid at this time. At my current stage in life, I have no desire to push for CE. I am in a guild because I enjoy the company of the people I’m with. We are a guild that usually reaches AOTC by the end of a season without any aspirations to push higher. That is the kind of guild I want to be in at this point; I enjoy raiding a few hours per week, but wouldn’t enjoy raiding more than that to push for CE.

When I was in college, however, I was pushing much harder in raids. I was in a guild that was competing for world 500 kills at the end of TBC and throughout all of wrath of the lich king. I was in college then, and as a heavy introvert, was preferring to spend my free time raiding WoW. If I were 10 years younger, there’s a good chance I would be striving for CE today, possibly even HOF.

In such a position, preferring a spec that’s perpetually bottom feeding in performance even when excluding the players who don’t know what they’re doing bringing the rankings down would greatly limit my options for raiding guilds that are looking for a feral druid. That would have a very real impact on my ability to achieve my goals if that’s where I happened to be with WoW. There are many players who are in this position. I’m not in that position anymore, but I’m also not arguing for myself.

I’ve played feral druid for the better part of 15 years now, and when stacking up against players who only raid for the community of it and leave a lot of potential on the table as a result, I’m going to perform well regardless what my spec’s ceiling actually happens to be. The same thing would not hold true if I were looking for CE every tier.

It depends how their numbers compare against the numbers of the people in my raid, not their raid. But even for the ferals who are performing well consistently, you can’t ignore the perception of recruitment teams in these guilds. When a spec has been at the bottom of performance (on average) even when played by the best players for tier after tier, there are a lot of raid leaders who won’t even consider the spec. Yes, they could be hurting their team’s chances long term by not considering the better ferals, but that still reduces the opportunities for those ferals.

That is absolutely not what I said. You want to pretend like every raid leader will be open minded enough to consider each applicant on their own merits, but that’s just not what happens. For every raid leader that buys into the ranking where feral is on the bottom, that’s one fewer raid guild available for those who want to play feral. Yes such guilds are unlikely to be as successful long term than those with raid leaders who are willing to review anyone who reaches their application feed with good performance numbers, but those guilds are oftentimes a stepping stone into the guilds that are more open minded.

2 Likes
28

People slays use this term when they are faced with data that directly contradicts their opinions.

Fact remains. Ferals are out there performing at the top of their group.

They are living their best lives.

Then there’s people like you. Who complain about things that have absolutely no affect on your gameplay.

That argument only holds any value if you find yourselves surrounded by players all performing at the same 99th percentile.

You don’t.

Not even remotely close.

YOU ARE NOT THAT GUY

Neither is OP.
Why are you pretending to be?

29

I didn’t cherry pick anything. I picked the first 3 that popped up. And they are indeed a counterpoint.

CE guild.
Feral Druid.
Feral Druid in top rankings.

Feral also only makes up 1% of all logged parses. Also being one of the lowest represented classes making it all the way to Sarkareth.

It’s easy to hide 10 bad performances from a class in a field of 100 data points. It’s not so easy to hide a single bad performance in a field of 3 data points.

It is applicable for the reasons I just stated. Especially when other classes have 400-500% the representation in logged parses.

You 100% can by looking at their individual logs, as I had previously stated. That shows their base performance. Then you can compare that to any guild/person/class you want.

And if we wanted to see how it compares to your guild, we can see that on Mythic, which is more difficult, a certain Feral is performing 20% better than your best on Heroic which is easier tier.

We put him in the same tier, and that 20% jump up to nearly 40% better.

And this is why we look at the player and not the class. Y’all’s some serious slaves to the meta my friends.

It is. Right here:

I don’t want to pretend anything. High end raiding guilds will look at an individual persons logs and determine that way. There’s a reason why successful guilds stay successful. And it’s not because a website tells them Ferals are bad so they avoid Ferals. As proven by the logs I provided.

The same guilds that will not be successful because they’re closed minded, are the same people who struggle in every form of content because they bypassed a Prot Warrior tank because he wasn’t part of the meta, although that Prot Warrior has the credentials and experience to do exactly what that guild/group is looking for.

It amazes me how many people use these websites rankings and guides as the gospel without realizing how/why they’re set up the way they are.

Are you aware that the Tanking guides on WoWhead and IcyVeins ASSUME that you’re running with a pre-made group of long time friends with voice comms and that you do not need to run nearly as many defensives talents, so they push for as much offense as possible because they expect your teammates to pick up your slack and play nearly perfectly?

I’d say about 2% of people who use those websites do. That’s why you see so many people just copy and paste and then complain they’re not getting the results they were told they’d get.

Same thing applies here. Guidelines. Not set in stone. Player > Class. Always has been, always will be. I will admit, other classes have more potential. And when looking at these 99th percentile logs, these come from players who are trained to pull those kinds of numbers with any class they touch. So specific guilds (such as RWF ones), stack classes because they need every advantage they can get because they’re going in at huge disadvantages.

And these 99th percentile logs. They pertain to that .1% of the population. Ferals aren’t very popular to begin with, so this circles back to the number of logged parses. Ferals are a hard class to master as well. So that goes back to what you said about average people bringing the class down. Which also goes full circle back to what I said about rankings and low parse counts.

Unless you’re trying to be CE within the first 8 weeks, those rankings lists do not pertain to anyone. And even if so, Ferals are getting CE while being the bottom of the barrel scum that everyone is claiming them to be

1 Like
30

What a trash opinion. It’s comments like this that only highlight your ignorance and confusion.

This stat for example…

You’re using terms like. “Bottom on the barrel”, “dead last” or “bad”.

You know what I see?
A feral pulling 112k dps.

Yes, when compared to every other class relative to that percentile…. It’s ranked “low”. (Top being 132k)

But…as Iv staved multiple time in this thread ad nauseam (and countless others)….You’re not playing with equal peers.

None of you are.

You’re acting like this list is a clear and distinct indication of where your spec and raid as a whole should perform. It’s stupid. It’s all crap. 100% garbage, easily proven so by the logs “cherry picked” by Grizzle, the logs from OP(103k) and your own logs(86k). Not one of you are raiding with a full roster of 99% parsing chads. Not one of you is parsing close to the potential of your spec

Yet…. you’re all acting like it.

Cut the crap

I could take that list and recruit a raid filled with “bottom of the barrel” specs. fire mages, ferals, Bm hunters…assasrogue, ww monk. All the “bad” classes. So long as they all performed at above average dps, they could easily clear all content with ease since they’re all Pushing well over 100k dps.

Your warlock was doing what… 15kdps???

These lists do not concern you.
Sit down and shut up.

Quoted for truth

1 Like
31

Was having a tiny bit of fun with feral until I saw the tier set, I’m no expert at bonuses or w/e but I immediately thought wow, this is trash and uninspired, anyways back to the other 3 specs.

32

QFT

Just for some insight: Mythic Kazz has 465 million health. Whats the average Mythic raid run? 2/4/14?

Assuming no damage for tanks and healers, enrage at 10 minutes, DPS only have to AVERAGE 62k dps per player for 9 minute fight.

We’ll say 60k to make things simple. So if someone is doing 70k, means you can do 50k. Someone pulling 100k? You can skirt by with 20k.

Those ferals could peform at 50% their avergae go and still beat the boss without being a detriment to their raid party. 50%

Let that sink in. You dont need 5 Arcane Mages doing 120k damage. Would it help speed things along? Absolutely. Necessary? Perhaps if you raid has LFR heros that afk 2 minutes into a fight.

But lets be real here. Its not hard for a Heroic/mythic geared Feral to pull off 60k dps

Edit: now that I’m on a computer and can look through logs easier, the 100th place Feral is still breaking 100k dps for that fight. A fight that only requires 60k…and they’re doing 100+

And we shouldn’t invite Ferals they say. LOL alright you guys. Go bench yourselves I guess

2 Likes
33

Nah…. Forget all that! Buff feral!!!

/s

Untill OP joins a guild where his “bottom of the barrel” dps becomes a detriment to his guild. (Clearly isn’t). Then he can complain about low dps.

Untill then…… get lost.

Edit:

It just dawned on me that’s there’s a whole bunch of “raiders” that have never experienced a full stop.

My raid leader would constantly be calling out dps stops so that mechanics, adds and/or floor denial wouldn’t overlap during phase pushes. I guess that’s the difference between pink parsing as a raid vs pink parsing as an individual.

Y’all not there yet.

Or even mount runs……

Guilds be out there selling multiple raid spots for mounts. The buyer is instructed to hit the boss and then go die in a corner like the scrub they are because their contribution to the raid is not required. and y’all in here talking about how feral needs a buff” because despite doing 112k dps, they came in….checks notes…… 20k dps below the top dps parse from players playing at a level you’ll never amount to.

Absolutely pathetic !!!

You need to spend less time in here complaining about ferals and more time talking to that warlock pulling 15k dps….or working out how not to die to molten scar.

2 Likes
34

I get what you’re trying to say, but then you go and add stuff like this which is just objectively false because both Sanctum and Sepulcher existed where Feral was one of if not the best spec at doing boss damage (i.e. the thing that actually matters most of the time) on every hard fight except Anduin (that doesn’t rely on external buffs).

Do raid damage profiles consistently favour burst damage on newly added targets? Yes. Is Feral good at this? No. Do raid stats reflect this? Yes.

Again, I’m all for discussing the strengths or weaknesses. I draw the line at making things up.

1 Like
35

You’re right, I definitely should’ve been more precise on the worst performing specs. Feral has been feast or famine for the majority of raid tiers, with more famine tiers than feast. There are a lot of guilds that don’t want to bring ferals in because of how few tiers melee is preferred and it’s not uncommon for ferals to be bad more tiers in an expansion than not. Without having numerous consistent tiers in a row of ferals being good, the stigma around the spec is unlikely to go anywhere. Having a second raid tier this expansion with feral being near the bottom more fights than not is quite concerning.

36

You only have yourself to blame for that.

you’re the one perpetuating it.

the “bottom” on that list… Its higher than youll ever aspire to reach.

Youre not playing the same game as those players.
Stop pretending you are.

37

In overall stats sure. I think this raid we’re definitely worse off than we were in Vault. In Vault at least the hardest parts of the two hardest encounters played to Feral’s strengths.

  • Diurna: The only hard part of this fight was killing the adds, which Feral was exceptionally good at, having damage for every add set.
  • Raz: The only hard part of this fight were the intermissions, which again Feral was exceptionally good at.

The problem was - and this problem persists into Aberrus - is that in order to be great at those parts you had to sacrifice a lot for the rest of the fight. It was just for those two encounters the rest of the fight was easily carried by everyone else, so you could afford that sacrifice. In Aberrus burst is so much more favoured (either single or multi-target) that Feral’s only real use is single target damage.

We’re not bad at single target by any stretch (and are only getting better on Tuesday), but it’s real hard to play it optimally.

38

Whats it like being wrong so god damn always?

Look… using your stupid 99th percentile stats from S1 that you treat as gospel. Show me where feral is consistently at the bottom.

10.0
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#dataset=99&region=1
10.1
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/31#dataset=99&region=3

Just more trash opinions.

39

5 of 8 fights feral is in the bottom half of specs. The only fights where feral was in the top half in 10.0 were Terros, Council, and Diurna. I said

You’ve made it clear you don’t like my method of determining relative spec strength, which is fine. But using it’s a true statement that feral is near the bottom in more fights of Vault than not, which was my statement. If all you’re going to do is twist my words to continue to try to “prove” I’m wrong, you’re wasting your time.

40

Shifting goal posts are we?
The word youre looking for is “mid”.

This Ricky Bobby mentality you have is ridiculous.

Because its wrong.
Your logic is foolish and it doesn’t pertain to you in the slightest, yet you pretend it does.
You’re delusional. Even on Ras, where feral is represented at its lowest @ 98.4k, we’re only 17k under the highest spec.

Whereas you personally…? The best you could muster up was 69.7k (and you were 2nd highest in your run)

Youre comparing apple to oranges.
Its stupid.

this entire thread was a waste of time.

Your opinion is trash.