TLDR; Feral is actually good, hopefully shadowlands utility changes will make it desirable, not crying about DH.
h ttps://www.wowmeta.com/bfa/dps-rankings
Feral and DH tied
Hi guys, if you are reading this you are probably just like me and are hoping for some good news regarding feral. Hopefully I can provide my view regarding our favorite hybrid feline.
Currently the community’s view of feral in BFA (let alone Shadowlands), is that of harsh criticism. It lacks the raw “degenerate (Ion Hazzikostas)” AoE potential of other specs like DH for example, that it isn’t durable and as useful as DH’s (looking at you Leech/Dodge/Darkness). The problem I find for feral is that it was and still is a hyper mobile sustained damage dealer, but very much a jack-of-all-trades but master of none utility/CD kit which was ok prior to DH and to some degree WW because the utility feral possessed was semi unique to them and made them attractive. But with the creation of monks and dh’s; other mobile leather melee classes that have superior utility kits than feral has resulted in ferals losing it’s niche and does not have the tools to compete with its biggest competition in its baseline utility kit yet… (shadowlands incoming)
I believe blizzard is attempting to address the power creep that has resulted in certain specs being extremely favorable in certain content. By all means classes should have niches that make them preferable and make the player feel special and needed, but players should not be rejected from certain content because they aren’t a certain class or spec. Mythic raiding and High Tier mythic plus will always have obvious superior classes that will probably have to be taken and that is ok, but that mentality shouldn’t creep warrantlessly into average to heroic content. (e.g not being able to get into -11 keys vs +16 keys)
My greatest fear regarding feral is that people misunderstand it. Look back to any expansion prior to the creation of DH’s (and to a lesser degree monks). Feral is/was an extremely niche spec, it was fast and extremely versatile. It could support any other raid/pvp role with buffs, healing, off tanking, or cc. And in the right hands can do viable to superb damage.
This brings me to my next point. Feral is very hard to play well.
AND THAT IS OK!
So many people in the WoW community look down on feral as a spec due to observing poor feral performance in the limited instances they group with a feral, or they are simply regurgitating previously regurgitated hate towards the spec to the point people will say they don’t like the spec simply because a lot of people have said it is bad.
So my questions for those people are,
Have you taken any time to understand feral?
Feral operates on a simple principle, buff your bleeds and bites as hard as you can on as many targets as you can.
There are a few things a feral player must do to ensure they are buffing their bleeds and bites as hard as they can.
In the current game Tiger’s Fury is a buff that grants 50 energy and a 15% damage boost for 12 seconds on a 30 second CD. (Don’t cast when low on combo points/high on energy, you also prefer for this to be pressed when you have bloodtalons up).
Bloodtalons is a buff granted by casting regrowth that gives your next 2 attacks a 25% damage boost over their duration, so bleeds receive this buff as well. (cast regrowth ONLY at 5 combo points, so in skilled hands, you can maintain extremely buffed Rips, Rakes, and Ferocious Bites over the course of a boss fight, which is required to match DH damage).
Instant cast regrowth is granted by using 5 combo point finishing moves. (So you probably won’t have Bloodtalons up for your first 5 combo point finisher of a fight which should be ferocious bite).
So now with those parts described, how is someone to put them together to assemble the wild animal that is a feral druid?
With lots of practice that’s how.
I am not going to go into detail about the feral rotation, but rather list off the complexity of the spec and the things a feral MUST do to compete with, by comparison, much simpler dps specs. I will do a direct comparison to DH as I feel it best fits the argument I am trying to make.
Total buttons in single target rotation –
DH = 4 buttons (eyebeams, chaos strike, demons bite, blade dance)
Feral = 8 buttons (rake, rip, thrash (w/ wild fleshrending (required azerite trait)), ferocious bite, shred, brutal slash, tiger’s fury, regrowth)
Dots to maintain –
DH = None
Feral = 3 (rake, rip, thrash (w/ wild fleshrending)
Procs/Buffs (That impact rotation) –
DH = None (Metamorphosis is not listed here as it is not a buff that changes what buttons you push to ensure optimal performance, whereas the feral buffs can change rotation and button/target priority on 2+ fights).
Feral = 3 - 4 (Tiger’s fury, Bloodtalons, Omen of Clarity, Predatory swiftness (could be bundled with Bloodtalons as this buff lets us activate Bloodtalons))
Something I wish to stress about WW and DH, feral’s main competition, regardless of the number of targets around them, their rotations remain the same (monk can crane kick as a spender perhaps). Whereas all the above mentioned dots, procs/buffs, and not mentioned rotation will all have their priorities change for feral, creating a multi-target rotation for feral. As well the feral has to figure out if a target will live long enough to merit using bleeds or if it is going to die quickly and that they must do immediate damage to preserve their meters (mythic+).
I am not saying you need to be a genius to play feral, nor am I saying anything bad about DH’s or easier specs
I am merely citing the stark differences between these two specs in hopes of showing why the feral population is so low, and why some of the people who choose to play feral do not perform well and give the spec a bad image. I would like the reader to think back to playing a racing game at a Chuck E Cheese’ or some other relatable arcade. The example I want to present to you will have to be Hydro Thunder, where you race super fast boats.
When you choose the boat you want to race with there is an indication as to how hard the boat is to use, with an easy medium or hard difficulty designation. I view WoW specs no differently than these boats, DH is easy mode and feral is hard mode.
AND THAT IS OK!
The different classes and specs in this game are supposed to appeal to different players, I find myself bored on DH, and find the buff and ability combos for feral to be highly satisfying especially when you see the big numbers they produce. I sincerely hope blizzard realizes that it is ok for specs to be harder than others and still elicit the same amount of dps/healing/mitigation etc as easier specs. I feel that players should not be rewarded for playing harder specs with more damage or healing because then certain players will feel forced into playing specs they don’t want to play. The player experience is what matters and if every class is easy and feels the same, a lot of players including myself are going to feel left out, as well as the other end of that spectrum if every class is made harder, some players are not going to be happy.
In conclusion, Feral is on the cusp of being in a great spot but blizzard cannot cave to inaccurate public sentiment about the spec, the Shadowlands alpha Bloodtalons changes are yet to be analysed, but specs changing over time has been going on since vanilla, the BFA iteration of bloodtalons just happens to be on the chopping block in this round of updates, I am looking forward to what Shadowlands holds in store for all specs.
I started playing druid/feral this expansion and have since put 830 hours into him, raiding mythic and competing in rated PvP above/around 2kcr and it is by far my favorite class to play since started playing this game as a child back in Wrath.
If you made it this far reader, I appreciate you taking the time to let me share my thoughts with you.
Kíñg of the Jungle