Feral Druid Rage

Classes Druid
1

Returning to Dragonflight has been a great experience, I’ve been a Feral enjoyer for many years and was excited to play Feral this expansion. However after getting to end game/higher tier content, the spec has felt in ways abysmal. Some of the changes during 10.1.5 such as “Dire Fixation” has been a great help to improve our Single target damage, however the static “3%” here, “X%”(from tier) there don’t feel satisfying because -

Fundamentally the game is much faster paced than it used to be. Energy as a resource feels extremely outdated and unsatisfying to play.

Omen of Clarity - 1/1
Tireless Energy - 2/2
Moment of Clarity - 1/1
Cat’s Curiosity - 2/2 (Good luck ever running that without loosing all your damage, all tho its a great passive in my opinion)

4 Nodes, 6 talent points total designed purely to “help us” mange our resource, which leads me to believe that even Devs to some extent understand that energy is a problem.

Our damage keeps getting buffed, but the problem is we can’t ever maintain it even with all the free combo - Ferocious Bite takes 50% of our energy (unless you have Tireless Energy - which most Feral’s don’t value enough to run)

In summary I think “Dire Fixation” was needed for Single target, our damage aside from that was and is solid in AOE especially(much less issues with Tiger’s Fury resets)

Brings me to think why hasn’t Feral received a resource change such as Rage for example, instead of having spenders, having builders thru our Combo Points into dumping at 5 combo points, seems like a more sustainable rotation without having to sit and pool and rely on Clear Casting procs, or dropping so much of our damage talents for Energy management. Aside from Rogue I can’t think of another class that has to pool resource and have downtime of doing NO DAMAGE (Fully bled on a ST, you’re getting out DPS’d by the tank unless you get some good RNG)

Last point, our talent tree feels like a disaster, having such big trade offs for ST vs AOE in our tree seems crazy, most classes don’t seem to suffer as much as Feral does by going M+ build and doing a Tyrannical Boss for example.

Apologies for the long post, and thank you for your time.

11 Likes
2

I think this is probably the most annoying part of the spec right now. Overall, I’m grateful for the changes in 10.1.5 because I’m able to do good damage in raid now, but I hate constantly having to switch my builds to accommodate fights that are more AOE heavy. The biggest problem here is you can’t spec into primal wrath without sacrificing some single target damage (or energy talents, to your point).

5 Likes
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Yeah I agree, the trade offs in that case are very annoying because you have to keep constantly changing talents and in some instances its just never enough no matter how you spread them.

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4

This is my pain point to playing feral as well. Coming from playing dev evoker, there is almost no difference between single target and aoe builds. Hoping they can shore that up in the future. :pray:

3 Likes
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Buff to ST also nerfed AoE, wp blizz. Worlds top feral is 3334 io.

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Blizzard has been practically admitting for years that energy as a resource is becoming clunky and outdated. You don’t need to look any further than the Rogue class as a whole. Rogue has gotten a lot of passives over the years to make energy management so much easier, and even with most of those moved over to the talent trees Rogue still isn’t having to choose between talents that lessen the energy constraints and important damage talents like Feral does.

Many Feral players, however, see no issue with how energy starved Feral can be. “Pooling energy” and “fishing for clearcast procs” and “waiting for Tiger’s Fury” is what supposedly adds depth to the spec. Unfortunately, that “depth” to the spec comes at the cost of doing no damage while we’re waiting for our limited ways to regain energy. At this point in time, I’d just be happy if Ferocious Bite did 100% additional damage for 35 energy instead of this stupid 50 energy to do 100% more damage. Or at the very least, bump Soul of the Forest from 3 energy per combo point to 4 energy per combo point, so I can get roughly half the energy I spent on a full cost Ferocious Bite back. Its pretty sad when Outlaw’s Dispatch will deal more damage than a 50 cost Ferocious Bite for only 35 energy.

Arguably Feral’s energy issues wouldn’t be a problem with higher haste, but with haste not being anywhere near as important as crit (especially with Circle of Life and Death, which causes bleeds to tick faster anyway) no Feral is ever going to have enough haste to improve energy starvation.

2 Likes
7

I have mained feral for many years but sometimes in BFA I ended up not enjoying the spec anymore, something feels off man.

1 Like
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first time playing/maining feral lot of fun swapped from a spriest