How is feral in 8.2 so far? Someone told me that they are so bad that they can’t compete with much lower geared people, which is worrying me but I don’t want to base it off a sample size of 1.
I can’t switch to boomkin cos there’s already 3 in our guild so I’m hoping feral is okay this patch.
It’s next to impossible to tell because HoA powers are all over the damn place and overpowering spec abilities.
Timed a 7 today, and the Druid tank was top of the meters. I was bottom but the 4 of us were all within 5-7k overall DPS of each other.
But it’s really not feeling good for ST builds.
Feral is doing great, really. Its biggest strength is that it can sustain the same level of damage for very prolonged periods of time, depending little on cooldowns to succeed (read: very little downtime). The spec is now amazing at aoe, with the potential to match or even surpass just about anyone. It is decent in ST, specially in long fights. You might start slow due to the lack of burst, but a minute or so into the fight you start to catch up, or even get ahead.
It has mainly two limitations. One, as I mentioned above, is the lack of burst. Damage is very consistent, which means you won’t see spikes in either direction, but it can be seen as lacking when fights end too quickly. The other limitation is the “lack” of utility when compared to other melee, or even to Balance itself, although it still is great, specially when you account the fact you can sustain yourself through self healing, making the healers job easier.
I’ve ran as Feral on several keys these past weeks and I usually end atop or just about 2nd in both overall and boss fights meters, and if heavy aoe is involved I’m usually top by a large margin.
I switch between Feral and Balance all the time, but if people are mindlessly padding meters and rushing things through, noone really can tell the difference.
I show up to the dungeon out of form & decide what to play based on the group composition. If there’s two melee dps, I go Boomy. If it’s majority casters, I go Feral. I don’t even ask sometimes. I’ve run some dungeons yesterday and people didn’t realize I was Feral until the end of the dungeon. I was blowing everyone else’s damage out of the water regardless of what spec I was playing.
Feral is beyond strong, if stacking 3 WFR traits your aoe is stupid strong especially with primal fury talents. I’ve seen some o the best ferals in the world pull around 45k single target playing this build. The rotation also feels really strong with the use of essence lucid dreams which makes the rotation a lot more fluid however if you really wanna min max you need to farm honor for blood of the enemy which boosts your dps by like 3/4k. In general if you have full crit/mast pieces. The pole arm from first boss in eternal palace, 3 WFR and 2 JF traits and around 420 ilvl you will easily top your raids metres. Getting blood of the enemy trait AND the red punchcard for getting revered with rust bolt resistance will also boost your ST by around 5k dps which will make you obliterate the metres HOWEVER both of these will probs be nerfed so farm rep/honor at your own risk. Have fun feral’n around ![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
Uhm… What? Is this with some some of the generic HoA traits?
ST builds were doing awesome about 3 months ago. In my experience recently they are relatively poor.
Nope.
Most of the damage will come from Swipe, and the rest will come from Rip as it’s being spread by Primal Wrath.
If you combine all that with something like Essence of the Focusing Iris, 100k is easily reachable in some packs.
Well In all fairness it was the rank one feral in the world, “ Hoofhardt”. If you’re wondering what he was running. He was running 3 WFR and 2 JF aswell as Harlan’s dice and the new trinket from raid. Aswell as having full crit/mast gear socketed AND heroic polearm from first boss. AND on top of that blood of the enemy essence and (don’t quote me) lucid dreams minor essence. I was lucky enough to randomly find him in a pug and ask a couple questions and in general he says he can reach around 35k on pure patchwerk during raid. (My 45k statement was based on his damage in a mythic plus which I guess was through his burstier period before ferals dps starts to dip on ST. And in response to the last guy, yes feral can reach around 100k dps on aoe packs. Our major downside is the minimal niche we bring the m+ group. However for keys under 13 in season 3 we are more than viable
The Iris can pull 300k burst DPS on just 4 targets. But any DPS can do that with the iris. It will make a feral look good if they’re the only one that has it. When everyone has it the age old problem of no significant burst and back loaded single target comes back to the forefront.
To say feral is fine because a top druid is doing good number with it right now… Compared to the rest of us… Lets see how the top players in other classes are doing first.
Three months ago my single target damage was carrying me just fine. Almost every one else was destroying me on AOE, but we’d get to a boss and I would make up a lot of ground. That isn’t really the case any more. BM hunters are keeping up with me on ST these days and even my own outlaw rogue can put up some decent ST damage.
Thats because youre using sabertooth and brutal slash.
Swap them out for predator and primal wrath and youll match ST damage and destroy aoe.
I’ll give it a shot but last time I tested that I think i was losing 2-3k single target DPS.
You do lose on ST, so for raids its not advised., … but for the aoe themed M+, youre not doing anyone any favours with an st build.
Depends.
If it’s a big AOE week ya probably, but then I just bring my outlaw.
If there’s enough AOE in the group already or it’s a week that inhibits big AOE pulls, sitting back in cat and focusing on off healing, bosses and giving everyone the warm fuzzy that they had to carry a feral works as well.
And now with that focus iris, anyone can be SotS droplet hero.
Whatever floats your boat.
Im just clearing up any disillusions youve created that feral aoe is weak.
Youre just using the wrong spec.
Never use brutal slash ever. The primal wrath/bloodtalons combo will eat that poopoo out of the water. Make sure you are using swipe instead of shred and primal wrath on x2+ targets. Shred/rip are for single target ONLY. If there up to x3 targets keep your rake up on them as well. x4+ targets swipe/primal wrath spam. Regrowth for bloodtalons proc at 4cp so you are able to rake > finisher or sometimes you can get away with 5cp finisher > rake.
Also using gushing lacerations x3 will boost your rip damage by a lot its not even funny. I use that with a jungle fury x1, blood mist x1, and Wild fleshrending x1.
If you bring your outlaw rogue for AOE weeks then your druid is never going to get geared.
Feral can do comparable damage so I don’t know why you wouldn’t just play both? I will never understand this mindset.
Everything you just said was wrong.
No. absolutely not.
Wasting a global on Regrowth is a dps loss on aoe packs vs just casting swipe.
Pimal wrath is used so frequently that you will simply overwrite the BT rips.
Not even remotely close to the damage lost by not using 3x WFR
This is the worst advice I have read on this forum all year.
Mostly stubbornness on my part, but also it’s a little bit of the right tool for the job mindset. Outlaw focuses on AOE, need AOE, I’ll bring my outlaw. Need single target and some off healing, bring the cat.
My man you need to sim yourself instead of just talking out of your behind about what the “top ferals” are using. The only advice you have given is telling people how wrong they are and not how to improve, which leads me to believe that you don’t know what you are talking about yourself.
Did you really just tell me that “wasting” a global on a 25% damage increase is a bad idea? That’s the worst advice I have read on the forums all year.
Yes, you are using primal wrath frequently in an AOE situation. However, you are using it to increase the INITIAL damage not the bleed ticking portion. Using gushing lacerations is only going to increase the damage of the ticks in general, by A LOT. You also get a 6% chance EVERY TICK to get another combo-point and that percent chance multiplies with every target, which is saving energy and globals meaning you spend MORE time getting finishers off.
The reason I do not take x3 jungle fury is because I already have 25% critical strike baseline. I only need one trait to get to 45% crit. With the new gear and some minor essences that will even be higher. The soft-cap for crit is 50% anything above that is potentially wasted damage since the damage is not based from your critical strike rating.
Then that’s a you problem, not the class. Feral excels at AoE & ST damage right now in M+ – with or without the Focusing Iris essence.