Feral druid intra-tuning and Design

Classes Druid
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To preface this post, any tuning mentioned is just within the spec itself, and does not replace or preclude any aura buffs to make the spec useful in comparison to others.

Damage Profile

A large reason for Feral’s continued lack of performance in raid is due to time. Feral druid requires time to deal its damage, a commodity that is almost never there. Feral does not have talents that are great when there is only a small percentage of time doing AoE, i.e.: a burst scenario. Yes, building into AoE has us losing single target roughly on par with the average spec, but we have to invest more into AoE than the same other specs as the adds number fewer and fewer. And- unlike other dot specs- the mobs need to be stacked! Put another way, the spec lacks flexibility.

Is that mandatory for a spec to perform well? No. There are other paths. The first is to be consistently tuned high enough that it does not matter that the raid doesn’t fit your damage profile. Another is to be so good at single target that the spec is desired simply to take care of boss damage (this is essentially what Feral was in shadowlands, but it was still not played, so clearly not good enough.) The last way is to have a niche that is relevant to the raid-- something that the spec is the among the best options for that actually exists on multiple bosses.

In mythic plus however, this issue is less pronounced. Most of the AoE comes from non-boss pulls, and those pulls last a sufficient amount of time. Even then, however, you can see Feral is not in the meta. There exist specs that deal more AoE damage. Specs with better priority damage. Balance Druid. Specs that deal more single target damage. Sometimes to an extent far beyond what Feral can bring. The spec is relatively more versatile here, but it’s not something you’ll ever build a comp around. It just exists as an option to pair with a physical-based composition when it is tuned high enough. (if we ever get a physical-based meta again). Why should groups be happy they have a Feral Druid instead of a Balance Druid for instance? I’d like to not be told I’m trolling by playing a “meme spec”.

Talent Tuning

Class Tree

  • Symbiotic Relationship needs a massive buff. (it is unplayably bad)

  • Matted Fur needs a substantial buff to be worth considering

  • Nurturing Instincts needs to no longer buff the damage of Lunar Inspiration. (buff LI by an equal amount to compensate)

  • Maim needs to be a smaller damage loss to cast.

  • Mighty Bash should have a 1s GCD instead of 1.5s

  • Heart of the Wild could use a reduction to its cooldown.

Spec Tree

  • Coiled to Spring needs a buff to its Primal Wrath portion.

  • Berserk: Frenzy needs some of its power moved into baseline Berserk.

  • Wild Slashes should buff Shred (by a lesser amount) in addition to Swipe so that is not a dead node due to single target.

  • Saber Jaws could use a small buff.

  • Adaptive Swarm (damage) needs nerfed. It’s become too strong and dominant over Feral Frenzy.

  • Feral Frenzy could use a buff

  • Incarnation: Avatar of Ashamane needs buffed. It’s worse than convoke in every way.

  • Ashamane’s Guidance (both versions) needs changed/buffed

Hero Talents

In general the idea is to increase the AoE output of Wildstalker, which has been relegated to being the Raid hero tree, and increasing the Single Target output of Druid of the Claw, which has been relegated to being the M+ hero tree.

  • Increase the proc rate of vines even more in AoE

  • Buff Twin Sprouts (buff it even harder if vines proc rate isn’t increased as well)

  • If we are buffing vines in a different way than increasing its proc rate, then buff Root Network

  • Allow Rampant Ferocity to proc Bursting Growth (or buff Bursting Growth)

  • Massively buff Ruthless Aggression

  • Massively buff Tear down the Mighty

  • Buff Harmonious Constitution

Ideas for changes/additions

note: While it is understood that Feral will not be getting +3y melee range back despite the front of the model not being the front of our hitbox; It is still frustrating to multi-dot targets with rake in AoE, where mobs can be more than 5y apart in a natural clump. Its not the casting of Rake that is the problem, its being out of range/shifting back and forth to be in range while doing so.

  • Remove Pouncing Strikes from the tree because it’s weird that Feral is the only spec that has to talent into this.

  • Reduce the cooldown of Incarnation: Avatar of Ashamane by 30 seconds. (baseline 2:30, 1:30 with Heart of the Lion) to separate its use-case away from Convoke.

  • Similar to the above, make it so that cooldowns tick 100% faster during Incarnation: Avatar of Ashamane. (makes it a 2:40 cd, 1:40 cd with Heart of the Lion). Ok this is probably too strong and might have to go with incarn nerf with this route

  • Make Ashamane’s Guidance (incarnation) similar to Shadowlands S3 tier set Sickle of the Lion. (pressing Incarnation pulses for AoE damage for 8 seconds reduced by circle)

  • Make Ashamane’s Guidance (incarnation) cause all of your spells to have an even lower energy cost and also reduces the global cooldown to 0.8s during Incarnation.

  • Make Adaptive Swarm smarter, like preferring targets with 1 or 2 stacks of swarm

  • Nerf Adaptive Swarm even more, but make it give a combo point

  • Make Adaptive Swarm 1s unhasted gcd as only Feral Druid has it now anyways.

  • Make Lunar Inspiration Moonfire a 1s unhasted gcd

  • Targets that die with a bleed on them grant energy.

  • A talent that gives you energy when Tigers fury has 5 seconds remaining

  • Buff Frantic Momentum and make it a 1 point talent. Don’t need to make a major cd so expensive to get.

  • Have apex bites not consume bt stacks

  • Make it so Tigers Tenacity can’t overcap combo points. With current apex it is hard to not waste the extra combo points if it procs back to back

  • Let saber jaws interact with convoke

  • Make brs baseline, delete swipe- add a talent that lets shreds cleave

  • Increase the damage of Brutal Slash and give it a longer cooldown (allowing it better function as a snap-AoE tool.)

  • A new spell that copies all the dots on the current target and recasting it on a different target applies those dots at full duration. Give it a long range.

  • Tear down the mighty being 15s cdr and giving a damage amp a la smoldering frenzy

  • Smoldering Frenzy returning as a capstone talent

  • Another look at Dash. A suffering from success moment where 60% move speed feels like a lackluster 40% move speed on a long cooldown due to our high base speed.

  • If you drop combat during Tiger’s Fury, its buff duration pauses for up to 10 seconds, or until you re-enter combat. (Akin to Sustained Potency for Archon priests.)

  • Remove combo-point cost of Maim

  • Increase the damage of Maim significantly (in pve), and make it trigger Rampant Ferocity, Sabertooth and Bursting Growth

  • Add a few more talents. (i.e. directly below Predatory Swiftness/Dreadful Bleeding if you want to keep the current shape)

  • Have Pack’s endurance increase the radius of stampeding roar as well.

  • Alternatively, make that a choice node, radius vs length

  • Async frantic momentum

  • Maybe async sabertooth?

Other Stuff

  • Need more cat forms, stat. Would be a huge win if all cats with the same skin as Cat Form out in the world were usable as a Cat Form option.

  • Some way to track snapshot strength in the base ui.

  • Need fewer icon redundancies as there are a ton of duplicates. For instance, Rampant Ferocity and Apex, the 3 berserk icons in the tree, Ashamane’s Guidance inheriting incarnation’s icon, tigers fury+carnivorous instinct, Predator + Sudden Ambush, Adaptive + Unbridled. Dreadful Bleeding and Rip&Tear. Rip & Tear debuff icon sharing with Veinripper (probably because it has Rips icon which Dreadful Bleeding also has) There are more; I’m just tired of listing them.

  • Confirmation that wildstalker vines proc chance is modeled with this formula: 0.6 - 1.13^(A * B - (C/targets with dot^0.94)) where A is the percent value of corresponding effect index on the talent spell data, B is (3 - base_tick_time) of the dot in seconds, and C is a cumulative count value where each failure adds A to its value.

21 Likes
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Completely agree.

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Blizzard please

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Blizzard, listen to this cat

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Good solid read I have to say well constructed. and yes this would take feral in a great direction.

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Crazymeow for feral dev since we very clearly don’t have one. A+ suggestions, would bring feral up to speed with other modern specs.

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Agreed, but I should mention that Feral needs to bring a utility that’s different than Balance druid to M+ scenarios. As of right now, Balance is essentially a ranged Feral, having the exact same utility that all druids, including Feral, has - with the addition of the rather OP Solar Beam. A good solution would be to give Feral druids something similar to rogue’s Iron Wire as an AOE silence, or something else that could put them on-par with Balance druids.

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We should get rogues atrophic poison since its the only thing that doe that effect.

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I see why low elo president elitist grizzle isnt commenting here. op is 6/8M.

anyways, I see a lot of are just ‘buff the counter part talent (exp: incarn)’ which i get that, but just too generic (im too lazy to point out things, but still agree with you 70%ish). I wish those talents have more distinction, like you take convoke in theaters of pain, which is more boss/mini boss heavy dungeon, and take incarn in trash favored dungeon like brew/priory.

one thing I completely disagree is swarm doing too much damage. obviously you are talking about raw damage it does, not the buffing part. (also dont know if you are referring M+ or M raid)
in case of M+, you are ignoring we are taking two talents, the bottom low talents. its single target, its about same/lower than feral frenzy, which is fine. if anything, frenzy needs buff, not the swarm nerf. (i tried frenzy instead of unbridled on boss amp dungeon like rookery (15) for testing, each did 3.5% of damage on last boss, overall each 2.1% at the end)

swarm itself does a lot of AOE damage, which as it should be since we are taking, again, two talents. (but also gated by ‘60%’ luck)

not related to this but,
one thing I really hate since the convoke was introduced is, having to press both berserk and convoke together.
you are essentially dumping 4 seconds of berserk because of the +damage it brings, meaning you are missing out at least 3+ bites. in this expansion it feels even worse missing that 4 seconds, because they could also be ravage bites.
synergetic also counter synergetic.

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Referring to both, on single target that one talent is doing around 10-12% of our total damage from raw damage and the buffing part which is kinda insane, there’s also a lot of people who don’t like swarm for various reasons, I don’t mind how it currently is but can see the point that it is extremely strong.

Completely agree it does feel off. You are essentially overcapping and wasting a tonne of combo points which does feel counter intuitive to how feral should play.

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Just havent bothered to look too deeply into it. Some i agree with, others i dont. Its just not really worth going into too much when it opens with:

Its just a melee thing in general.

Then theres:

Wildstalker + Bursting Growth + Apex focus on this pretty good. Dont even have to swap off of target, can pump straight single target rotation and still get the job done.

Talents and abilities are there. Tuning could get another pass on Wildstalkers AoE aspect to help out, or another 20% increase to Bursting Growth (1 → 1.2 → 1.44) and

this too as ive advocated for this change myself

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Ya bursting growth could do with a buff if you want to use it for aoe burst because at the moment it is pretty irrelevant for doing any sort of burst damage, would also like to see them increase the aoe proc rate of vines.
I do feel like we already have a good aoe burst ability its just not tuned to do that in brutal strike though, I never played in legion but heard that brutal strike used to be an aoe burst monster, can easily make it at least decent again by buffing it a lot but increasing its cooldown and energy cost.

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Ruined it with this though. Wildstalker is the opposite of having good aoe burst.

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Which is why:

The argument was that we didnt have the talents for it. We do. Its set up perfectly for it. Issue is just the damage.

Allow RF to proc bursting growth. If we need a trade off for it, hard cap bursting growth to 5 targets per vine

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i dont know how to quote. but 10-12% is way off. i dont know where you getting that number from

i just quick checked 5 logs of 18s brew, and only one player had 7% on bosses, others had 5% and mostly below

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Logs only show direct damage of the spell not the dot amping part wowanalyzer can show you the actual damage swarm is providing. In a 14+ theatre of pain on kultharok swarm did 13% of my damage through direct and dot buffing, additionally checking meteos’ +19 theatre of pain swarm did 10% of his damage on mordretha

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but even if you go single point in raid swarm is still one of our most powerful talents, for example on my rank 1 mythic spocketmonger kill swarm did 9.41% of my damage for additional context convoke is doing around 6.5% of my damage, it is an extremely powerful talent

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i dont think you are reading mine as much i didnt read yours. (haha)

now you are adding the buffing part. your initial post was just single sentence.
I expected just the raw damage it does.
of course buff portion should be extremely strong. even better this expansion since we have ravage bleed, (or since you are raiding the wildstalker posion, aka one more very strong bleed.

since feral energy regen is very weak, often times people wait for the energy recharge before procing blood talon. meaning ferals can squeeze out almost 80% uptime on swarm, which was never the case before (as for me, since i taken 2nd omen or at least one tireless in previous expansions, i used to just dumb energy recklessly). that is another factor; we never used swarm this diligently before in previous expansions. (obv frenzy or even double carnivorous were better choice before, so i guess nobody really tried)

just saying swarm too strong is not correct. (sure some occasions like that particular 19 theaters, but we all have more lucky crits time to time or maybe he had good spreads of the swarms on the 3 trash mobs along with that last boss)
you are neglecting a lot of factors that came in with this expansion.

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its not so much that i think swarm being strong is a problem its more that other talents aren’t nearly as powerful, if you want more single target damage you talent swarm no debate, Feral frenzy which used to be a single target flex talent basically has no place in talent choices in m+ because swarm is effectively doing double its damage.

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So when you’re talking about AS, you refer to the +25% DoT bonus.

When you talk about FF, are you considering that the free combo points and thus free finisher are also contributed to FF as well?

To keep things on an even playing field that is