I finally got around to trying Feral Druid. I just boosted my Druid a few days ago and I’ve only played Balance to far. I didn’t expect much out of Feral. The community perception seems to be that Feral is pretty meh but I found myself enjoying it way more than I assumed I would. I like the style of putting up a bleed and then capitalizing on it with an ability that does extra damage if the targets bleeding followed by picking the finnisher that best suites the situation. If they’re low health you do a bursty bite, if they still have a decent ammount of health you go for Rip, the heavy dot finnisher. Its simply yet the decisions are meaningful and imo pretty enjoyable. I also really like how the Aoe is basically a copy paste of the above (without the bite) and you never have to weave in any single target hits if you don’t want to. Something that always bugs me a lot with my Frost DK is having to spend Runic Power on Frost Strike during Aoe scenarios.
The only thing I wish Feral had was an Aoe Equivalent to Bite.
Seriously considering maining Feral in SL.
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Here’s hoping they improve feral from where it’s headed for shadowlands.
The game play is what drew me to the spec.
The lack of damage vs the effort put in is what breaks it every xpac.
Don’t take that like I am telling you not to play feral.
I main feral myself, and hopefully can keep it that way going into SL, so long as it doesn’t turn into a dumpster fire with stats again.
Primal wrath is your go to aoe finisher, you can bounce around on 2 or 3 targets and focus stacking dots on each to maximize your output also.
There is a lot of flexibility in the spec and choices to make during different encounters.
That is 100% what I love about it. It’s not the same 3 buttons over and over… you get to mix in 4, 5 and 6 sometimes lol.
I’m glad you are enjoying the spec, and hopefully we get treated better in SL than our BfA beginnings.
Losing our passive prop-ups will show what weaknesses the spec has again, hopefully they get shored up quickly though so I can progress with the character I want to, instead of swapping mains to stay viable early on… again.
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I never have looked at druid boosted gear until now.
They actually set you up fairly well with crit/mastery.
I bet it does feel pretty good with those stat percentages.
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It’s more fun than Classic Feral that’s for sure. I found Guardian and Balance to be quite boring. Feral and Restoration is quite beautiful. The’re not the optimal combination for output but, it’s loaded with utility. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had playing WoW.
I’ve played Restoration with Feral Affinity for awhile on another account. Healing high level keys and “Catweaving” was quite a thrill. It still is and I recommend you try it out.
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This would be amazing. I think they could simply make Primal Wrath do more damage and not reapply the dot if the duration on your current rip is at a certain number. Alot of times you will renew the dots super early if you’re going ham on AOE.
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It is fun, the problem is it’s difficult to get into groups as Feral. Most of the time players want Boomkins and Resto Druids, it’s very frustrating.
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I love feral, but I fear a lot of our power comes from traits and corruption. We work hard for our dps, when my boomkin spec gets higher dps and much more quickly.
We lose some our our survivability in SL and the Blood talons change is a bandaid on the Titanic.
I’ll still be playing feral of course. I worked hard for my mage tower kitty, and by Elune I’m gonna be using it. 
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Ferals have fallen into this bad stigma also partially because alot of new players to feral dont know how to play feral properly, how to prioritise rotations,gear, stats and azerite traits etc.
The trouble with feral is its very punishing if you mess this up. So you have lots of new players doing sub-optimal damage giving everyone a bad view of ferals as a whole. Unlike other faceroll specs like demon hunters where it doesn’t really matter what traits you have or your rotation, just spin to win.
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To be fair, it is quite a lot to cognitively manage at once. I sometimes like that, because complexity is fun, but other times I’m just like “damn, all that work and it didn’t pay off”.
Yes. The risk vs reward structure is weird sometimes. Blizzard does have a tendancy to reduce complexity to “bribe” players to play a certain class. They have done this before with Death Knights.
Majority of Feral mains aren’t saying it isn’t fun. I’ve been in love with Feral since BC. Played it in vanilla as well.
The issue with feral is Blizzard keeps nerfing and pruning us after other classes complain anytime we’re strong. or making our unique abilities baseline for druid, making Feral less likely to be taken when they can just bring a resto or boomy.
Feral is insanely fun to play. If they can buff bleeds and give us survivability back, most of our complaints will go away. Also one of the biggest appeals for Feral for the longest time was that we were much more mobile than everything but now everyone and their dog has high mobility.
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