For a long time now, feral druids have been stuck playing second class citizens to rogues.
To start, theres absolutely no reason that prowl needs to have a 6 second cooldown when rogues stealth has a 2 second CD. As a rogue you can go through quests picking up objectives and stealthing away in moments, and as a feral you’re stuck just standing around waiting for the CD to finish.
You have no hard target break, and that’s ok, as a balance thing, we have other abilities that make up for it, but the cooldown on those things is absolutely excessive. Survival instincts is our only real significant defensive, and it has a 3 minute cooldown… rogue defensives have a 2 minute or less cooldown. As a result, we are the focus choice in every single arena as the softest target.
We have no vanish unless we talent into incarnation, which is subpar in every other way.
Our rotation is painfully clunky. We have no mechanical energy regen, only a single move with a 30 second cooldown. Assassinations energy regen mechanic feels amazingly smooth, and even sub, which is designed to be more bursty, you are able to build in such a way that you dont energy starve and have to wait more than a moment until several rotations in. On feral, you run out of energy instantly and never get it back, you spend more time waiting on energy regen than you do actually using moves.
Thrash is hilariously weak for no apparent reason at all. It does so little damage both initial and DOT that its primary use as feral seems to be just making sure you have an ability that will aoe more than 5 targets for when you’re clearing legacy content. Its thematic as another bleed, and that’s ferals thing and all, but it just does absolutely pathetic damage. Some more mechanical value out of it would be nice. Even something as simple as letting it stack like it does for guardian would be at least something.
Shred is bad too. Unless its empowered by Mangle, (which is, again, a THREE minute cooldown), it only grants a single combo point unless you crit. Its damage is on par with sub rogues backstab, which for anyone who doesnt know, your entire goal as a sub rogue is to use that move as little as possible because it’s so much worse than shadowstrike. As a stealth opener, its even more pathetic. A 60% dmg increase when its damage is already so low leaves it with essentially no reason to ever be used as a stealth opener. As a result you will almost always open with rake instead… nearly every move you could open with from stealth as a rogue will grant an additional combo point for being used from stealth, yet Rake still grants only one. A stealth opener granting only combo point is pathetic and would never be inflicted on rogues. Why do ferals have to deal with it?
Primal wrath. It’s an excellent ability, my issue is that it really needs to just be included as a part of the kit, not as a talent. Without it, the spec has absolutely no AOE finisher, and the spec is entirely based around its finishers. Something else should take its place as a talent and it should simply be given as an ability. They need something, especially with how pathetically weak Thrash is as an AOE move.
Sustain wise, the rng on predatory swiftness is frustrating. Because you do have a chance to crit, (and if you are using mangle, you will be getting multiple combo points as well) it is not linearly efficient to use another combo point generator if you have 4 combo points already. You should go ahead and use a finisher. Yet if you do so, you have a chance to get absolutely no predatory swiftness at all, meaning no regrowth cast, and this is often the difference between life and death in an arena. It would be much less frustrating to have it scale in effectiveness based on the combo points used, 1 combo point being 20%, 2 is 40%, 3 is 60%, 4 is 80%, and 5 is 100%.
Lastly, and even if not a single other thing here was done, PLEASE FIX FRONTLINE FORTITUDE FOR MELEE DRUIDS AND PALADINS! It has been entirely too long now that they’ve just been shafted if you random queue into ashran, and everyone else has literally double your health and healing taken. I literally get flamed for even daring to queue for epic BG’s as feral or ret, knowing theres a chance I can get ashran. It’s been so long now, and it seems like such an easy fix, please just pay attention to pvp for once and do it, like, please, it’s so ridiculous for this to have even gone on for more than a day, like this should have been hot fixed the week after frontline fortitude was released and you could see that we didnt have it.
I certainly wouldnt expect all of these to be changed, but some consideration of them would be nice. Theres absolutely no reason not to change prowl and the frontline fortitude issue, the others are more balance oriented and I understand that, but feral isnt at any risk of becoming wildly op given where we are in the game right now, and it would be pretty safe to give them some love. Trying to play as them atm just doesnt feel good compared to the smoothness of other classes. I love them and I’ve played it for years, I dont want to play rogue or whatever else, but TLC would really serve to make it feel less like I’m actively choosing to gimp myself by playing feral instead of rogue.
P.S.S.
I dont ever think it will actually happen at this point, but it feels like it would be very doable to add our old Saberon forms from WOD into the barbershop, and I for one would absolutely love it if you did that, please <3