I’ve said (potentially in another thread) that I would like it if Bloodtalons worked as a proc on FB to increase the damage of the next Rake, and on Rake to increase the damage of your next FB. The vast majority of BTs go towards increases those two spells anyway, so just cut out the middle man and make it so that I dont have to cast regrowth if I dont want to.
I understand that a lot of people like the off healer playstyle. I’m not asking for PS to be removed.
Im saying that for those of us who dont enjoy the Vanilla Hybrid Class mentality of “its like X dps but worse because it can kinda heal” we should have the option of never ever casting a heal if we dont want to. After all, literally no other dps spec is required to.
However, using this setup, you’d be gimping your Thrash, Brutal Slash, Primal Wrath, Rip attacks. There are times when you want to use BT on those instead of FB or Rake. You are basically saying you want to eliminate about 70% of your options for using BT. That’s insanity to me. So, I’d have to vote no on your proposed fix. I’m still willing to entertain alternatives though.
Edit: To be clear, you’d want to use BT on Brutal Slash whenever you have Tiger’s Fury off cooldown so you can dump all 3 charges there with the first 2 being backed by the BT buff AND the TF buff. If you are in M+, you replace Brutal Slash with Primal Wrath and BT a Rake or FB and a cast of PW as often as you can. Or, if you have enough targets, like in Reaping, you just mongo Thrash/Swipe and PW. Especially if you have Wild Fleshrending azerite traits. Basically, it’s the more nuanced gameplay your proposal would shut out, and we have been losing enough of that already.
I personally like the bloodtalons playstyle just because it adds an extra layer of thought in an era of specs where there is almost no layers of thought to. But could you elaborate on what you mean when you say you would rather see it emphasized?
I would like to see predatory swiftness to include hibernate and remove corruption and for their casts to grant bloodtalons.
However, I’m open to the idea of another snapshotting talent that may be better for the current state of the game. I like the idea of being able to mega empower our bleeds with not just tf but also bt. If they could achieve this in a different way then through casting regrowth I would be open to it but it would have to be more than just a gcd for same effect because regrowth is beneficial. To just turn bloodtalons into a snapshot button that we can press on demand would hurt our utility further as it would decrease incentive for using our predatory swiftness proc.
I don’t like to close the doors on other concepts just because I currently think something is useful in its current iteration. If they want to give us something that is clearly more value to us then yeah, I will take it.
So i personally hate BT and feel like it just makes the rotation clunky and obnoxious, but i see why others like it so as long as there is fairly competitive replacement I’m fine with it being the “#1” talent (just keep MoC with in a 2-3% difference and I’m happy). I’m perfectly OK with the harder talent being more dps.
This brings me to my real point of my post, Sabertooth. I am totally OK with sabertooth as a talent and with what it does, but I believe that as a rotational super simplifying talent it should NEVER be the highest dps choice on a teir. I have a few ideas on what could be done to help.
Move the Tigers Fury resetting ability of predator to baseline feral and replace it with this: Eye of the Tiger- increases the effect of tigers fury to 20% and your finishing moves increase the duration of tigers fury by 0.5 sec per combo point.
While I’m not 100% sure on a good % increase to make this a competitive talent, i really feel the design would make for a much more engaging rotation by encouraging more thought/reward goes in to snapshotting your bleeds as well as combo point management.
Lunar inspiration is also in need of a solid buff, but I’m not sure on how to go about that, except maby giving it the Twin Moons talent to make it help with cleave?
All utility/healing spells should be castable in form.
I would also like to slightly rework how predatory swiftness works, drawing inspiration from the old enhancement shaman maelstrom system. Instead of 20% chance to proc a instant heal/root, every combo point spent should grant a stacking buff that reduces the cast time and mana cost of your next spell by 20%, stacking up to 5 times. This would remove the RNG of using finishers that weren’t a full 5 combo points, while making the system work almost the exact same when 5 point finishers are used.
Bloodtalons should then increase this cap to a max stack of 10 (that would be 2 instant cast spells) this would allow more agency of when/how to use BT while lessening the RNG punishment of using non 5 point finishers.
Couldn’t agree more on this. But I’m also okay with sotf and sabertooth being baseline to give us higher apm and to make these things that feel obnoxious a lot less obnoxious as a result. What I suggest is just a drastic first thought change and not serious but I’m trying to emphasize a lot of classes have things that are clunky but because of how they’ve changed the class around that its became a lot less clunky. What if using predatory swiftness granted us 250 haste for 5s? That would make the gcd feel awesome and help both pve and pvpers in a lot of situations. again off the top of my head.
Lets break this down 1 by 1.
Tigers fury is a snapshotting ability having predator baseline would not only devalue a feral playstyle a lot of ppl enjoy it would also have huge implications for feral being to strong on any fight with small add cleaves in raids. Especially with scent of blood pairing.
1A. However, the ladder of the idea I love. I almost want to say we just have a bad taste in our mouth right now for predator because sabertooth is so strong. Thats why I don’t want it to be baseline. However, I loved the sub rogue legendary bracers before nerf in legion that extended shadow blades and I loved behomethes headdress or however it is spelled which is what your suggesting but with more damage added into TF. I like this concept a lot but I think we need to focus on sabertooth more than predator being baseline.
1B. I will agree with you its not good to just flat out buff it to make it a % damage increase I don’t agree that it will put more thought into anything as maybe you will want to let rip fall off now if fully empowered and reset but that isn’t any more thought provoking than sabertooth instead of a FB cast your just casting rip again.
Lunar Inspiration should either be baseline or an empowered proc baseline where we can use moonfire in cat form even if it only procs once or twice a minute to have an extra dot we can throw out would be cool.
2A. I like the idea of twin moons for Feral but I feel like it takes too much design from balance in an era where they dont want us to have innervate because its a caster thing? last time I checked i had a mana pool outside of cat form and im a hybrid that can cast spells though lol. I would like this though. However, it wouldnt help it really in a ST situation which I dont like.
Massive no to your bold text. Were a hybrid melee that shapeshifts. I’m for increasing the pool of spells that predatory swiftness can effect such as hibernate and remove corruption. But I’m also in favor of being able to use our affinity abilities with ps. imagine being able to starsurge with balance affinity with your ps instead of regrowth? that would be really cool. It would be cool to use predatory swiftness on wild growth for example with restoration affinity. It would significantly increase our utility for raids and afaik ferals are struggling with damage and survival in pvp and this would help the ladder a bit.
I guess the way you go about suggesting it isn’t exactly as bold as you state it in the header though. I personally like how PS works now proc wise. I just want to see an increase to spells that can be cast with it. I don’t understand why are spell pools are limited with it. Would be a very welcome change imo.
I wouldn’t mind if they got rid of Blood Talons and replaced it with something else. I like Savage Roar but don’t feel it is strong enough even after the 8.1 buffs. Even sitting at a target dummy SoTF is outperforming SR for me. Maybe my gear isn’t high enough yet for it to be worth it but like Lunar stated, this is another example of a harder-to-use talent giving less results than an easier talent (SoTF) and Sabertooth vs. LI and Predator on Tier 1.
The affinity talent choices, while nice, are kind of useless. The times when you will be swapping into Moonkin form to do some ranged damage are few and far between. The extra 5 yards on all your abilities is nice, but I would easily take Guardian Affinity for the reduced damage over that.
Restoration Affinity is another weird talent. We have the option to use a few random heals with our limited mana pool to help out the group if they’re in danger but once again, as long as everyone is doing their job the moments where you need to do that is going to be few and far between. So short of progressing content (where you usually want as much dps as possible anyways) I don’t see that affinity being very useful, other than the passive healing it grants. It also makes it where you feel you have to watch the groups health when as a dps you should be focusing on doing damage, not healing. That’s what they have healers for…I wouldn’t even mind healing if it didn’t take me out of form but alas, it does and then you have to waste a global getting back into form before you can even do anything.
As far as the level 60 talent row: Mighty Bash - a single target 5 second stun on a 50 second cooldown which is subject to diminishing returns from other stuns? Yea no that’s useless. I wouldn’t mind seeing the aforementioned talent turned into an AOE stun with maybe a reduced duration or something. Mass Entanglement is nice but it breaks on damage so it’s hard to use unless you’re just planning on running away and not fighting anything…which nobody does. Typhoon is the only really useful talent on this row.
Bloodtalons is horribly designed. It might be passable if the OOC clarity proc lasted more than a terrible 10 seconds, but instead they have the blood talons proc last 20 some seconds which is needlessly long and stupid.
It’s pretty obvious they don’t care about feral. They claim to read all the forum posts, so if that’s true what conclusion can you draw other than they don’t care. I don’t see them changing anything.
Yes, and it’s not like players are inviting dps to off heal in mythic+s or raids, healers seem to be doing fine by themselves. Heck, I’ve had some healers get upset that I was healing myself b/c they didn’t understand it was to boost my damage.
So what is an alternative you’d like to see in ADDITION to the Regrowth and Entanglement proccing it? I get you don’t like it. So give us an addition to the list that would be good. Personally, if they made LI baseline it could also proc off that, and the talent would have something like a built in silence/interrupt or something maybe on a cooldown. Some sort of utility.
Bloodtalons seems like something that was meant for PVP. Every other DPS spec doing some kind of active healing is for PVP. It’s out of place as a regular talent and if anything should be a PVP talent. While paladins have a healing tier at level 90 talents, 2 of them are purely healing/utility, and the other is a damage move that automatically heals you for the damage done. None of them require an active heal which does no dps followed by strengthening a DPS move. It’s terrible design for PVE.