I’m personally on the fence with Relentless Predator. On one hand, that talent is there to shoehorn Feral into using Ferocious Bite more often, which basically makes Feral a discount Assassination Rogue with much less emphasis on Bleeds than the spec had at the start of Dragonflight. On the other hand, Ferocious Bite now costs 15 energy baseline (30 for the 100% more damage) freeing up a bit of Feral’s energy economy. But then in 10.1 its going back to only a 20% energy cost reduction, once again making it a less impactful talent. I’m not entirely convinced that the new Berserk is going to make up for Ferocious Bite now costing more energy simply because “Relentless Predator is providing too much energy in Berserk specifically”, in Blizzard’s own words. I guess having up to 60% energy reduction on Ferocious Bite is too much (40 from RP, 20 from Incarn), but they’re further hamstringing Feral’s ability to deal damage outside Incarn windows in a spec that already heavily depends on that singular cool down to actually deal competitive damage.
I really want to play Feral, but its hard to justify it to myself when nearly every melee outside Windwalker just performs better. Even Obliteration Frost is performing better and I didn’t think such a thing was even possible.
Where are you getting this information from? Feral was meta for the MDI this season (ran in every comp) and they are completing some of the highest keys available.
If you lean hard into Feral’s AoE, they can output respectable numbers for Mythic+ at the cost of doing nearly nothing to the bosses. This also means that for Season 2, Feral is going to be almost exclusively used in Mythic+ because Aberrus is predominately single target oriented. Unfortunately, Blizzard has this design philosophy that certain specs need to be niche in different scenarios, so if I expect to be able to run Aberrus and not having too work twice as hard as other melee to keep my single target up there, I might as well run a different spec entirely. I don’t want to be stuck doing only Mythic+ if I decide to play Feral, so I might as well play something else.
This is an exxageration, IMO. I will agree that Feral single target dps lags behind others but not to the point where it is going to make a difference in overall damage numbers for the dungeon.
I havn’t looked at Aberrus but even if their are single target fights, you can change talents between fights so that doesn’t seem like it will be a problem. This is what I did on VotI in my heroic guild and I kept up with the other dps in my guild pretty well (admittedly a small sample size, my raid group was only 10 people).
Changing talents is nice. Glad that we can do it with no cost involved in between fights.
This is less impactful when circling back around to the original discussion of this thread:
Feral single target is underwhelming. Its disappointing. Feral’s single target is almost entirely shaped around Berserk/Incarnation. When its up it feels great. When its not you feel like you’re tickling whatever you’re fighting and you’re desperately trying to blow through as many combo points as possible for the cool down reduction from Heart of the Lion to kick in, which further constrains Feral because pooling energy is even more core to Feral than it is for all three Rogue specs. Although this could possibly change for the better with the Season 2 tier set.
Feral basically has the inverse problem of pre-rework Retribution. Old Retribution had way too many stacking modifiers to keep track of that gave them really good burst every couple of minutes and nearly nothing else in between. Feral instead has most of their power coming through a single cool down and doesn’t offer a whole lot of (single target) damage outside that cool down. Granted Feral isn’t the only class designed this way, but just because multiple specs or classes have this doesn’t make it good game design.
Hi there! I was reading through a few of the posts here are some pointers about Feral Single Target.
Feral Frenzy is almost always a must. Paired with Adaptive Swarm, it provides a good boost to pure single target. I even take Feral frenzy in Mythic plus as on Tyrannical weeks it provides the steady single target damage needed to get through high keys.
Changing stats may be what propels you forward in single target. I’ve done quite a bit of research on this and after talking with an extremely good feral buddy of mine he suggested sacrificing crit to go into a heavy mastery build. For me, this made a huge difference in both single target and AOE. I’ve seen logs from some top Feral’s for both raid and M + that have a Mastery of well over 3k. This was what I was missing. Also having a good deal of haste will shorten the window between combo point generators. Using Howling rune over Buzzing works if you are comfortable with your crit rating.
Not overlapping your dots too early. Try not to overlap your Rip, rake, and thrash dots too early. You want to especially wait to refresh your rip if you are talented in Tear Open Wounds until about 4 seconds remain on your current application. Why? So you can get the max damage from Tear Open Wounds without wasting a tick of Rip’s damage. This can also help with filler combo point generation for Bite damage. This also applies to not using your Ferocious Bites too early as they gain a bonus for consuming additional energy to increase the base damage.
Using Shred over Rake for Sudden Ambush procs. For Single Target Shred is one of the top damage dealers (of course not better than Bite or Rip and any Sudden Ambush procs should be used for Shred UNLESS your rake is close to falling off. Shred not only has 60 percent increased damage with a Sudden Ambush proc but also Increased chance to Crit and ALSO generates an additional combo point.
Experiment - Try your own builds and experiment with the Raider’s Target Dummy to see what works best for you. Personally, the Adaptive Swarm/Feral Frenzy Single Target build was initially difficult to master so for a while I had another build that worked better for me. Once I got more comfortable with the original build I used it on Single Target fights.
I hope this helps those that are trying to Master the Feral Spec. I have enjoyed Feral since Cata and was very happy to have Main’ed a Feral Druid this season.
Feral Frenzy helps single target DPS–but I think all told, there needs to be a way to buff Rip on single target without buffing Primal Wrath. Ret Pallies can BRez, and the rotation is about 10 times easier than feral. We need single target dps to go up a bit–even if they nerf our AoE.
I just came back from a break and relearned Ng Druid in this patch, but I’m wondering do we still have to take the right side talents in the druid tree which are basically balance spells/passives? I noticed on different builds we are going down that side of our tree but I’d really rather go down the resto abilities/passives instead for more self healing.
I can’t stand balance but is it our only optimal choice for solo world content and group content instead of the resto path?
Also do we really have to take bear abilities nods in the feral tree or can we drop those and go for other self sustain/dmg nods?
It’s highly recommended due to the range increase to all your skills, but is certainly not needed in all scenarios. If you find more enjoyment from the resto branch, then more power to you!
My ST is pretty fine, no real complaints. I have Incarn, swarm and tigers fury on a macro so I stealth in to pop macro shred - bite - rake - bite - thrash - bite - shred/bites until incarn is done and refreshing my bleeds along the way- swarm when off cd and fury when off cd while simply doing the normal shred bite rotations. When fury buff is gone and off cd… use the 5 combo point generator attack to re apply rip.
Im a nelf so vanish shred could yield extra combo points… if you do this, you should be solid. At 416 ilvl I hit 70-80k and maintain low to mid 60’s after burst for ST.
That’s of course not no “”elitist”” numbers but doing that dps ST and roughly 95-130k every trash pull yields me satisfying results in every group.
I’m in that same range, about 70k fps single target unless it’s a stupid long tyrannical boss and then I sometimes get down to 55k-ish. Aoe is still kicking off aroubd 130-150k depending on the pack and pacing. Only thing kind of holding me back on aoe is the ramp to get primal wrath rolling the second time and getting to where I can toss in some bites and Apex procs. A lot of other specs burst way harder on pull than what feral can, but if the trash lives long enough it all averages out fine.
The thing that worries me is that S1 tier still kinda feels like it’s propping us up a bit. When we go to S2 tier it isn’t as good for us imo. Most everything I have read says to not break up the S1 4pc set until you can make a decent item level S2 4pc.
Unless the tier set provides a substantial reversal of fortune feral isn’t looking good this tier. Even our AoE isn’t looking all that special anymore.
I dunno. I mean it looks pretty lackluster overall because it’s all passive bonuses, but it looks like a 5% aura buff to everything. And then the 4 piece, if I’m reading it correctly, is an additional 5% agility (so 10% overall. Like an on use trinket). And then free combo points.
A lot like Guardians 4 piece, once we get into combat, this should be nearly constant once it gets rolling.
Taking Incarn already has me reducing Berserks CD like crazy, and now we’re taking off an extra 15 seconds of that CD every minute we’re in combat?
Like I said, doesn’t look like much, but given a 10 minute patchwerk fight, I think it may do better than we expect
Back to being severely energy starved on bosses in m+, abysmal performance on single target in m+, and iLvl to ilvl, not doing anything special in multi target unless we get above 8 targets for an extended pull. Seems like a lot of classes are scaling better than us on 3-8 mobs.
I’m personally not doing well on single target raid and can’t really find where I’m losing DPS. So not going to say much about that. Think the sims might be doing verse wrong or that trinket that stacks with other people that have it is really really strong.
This is where that combo point every 2 seconds is going to come into play. I mean, it’s still going to feel bad since we’re not “actively” creating the combo point.
