I suspect the problem they have is they need to increase AoE without increasing single target because any more pure single target could make us OP in raid.
Good point, it might make certain legendaries scale to strong with a bleed buff.
Changing the community perception so you can pug as Feral, or finding friends.
There are no balance changes Blizzard will make that will change this overnight, sorry.
Like even now the received wisdom that Feral is bad in M+ is incorrect. The problem is that you’re not as good as the best melee, so when there’s a glut of people applying to random pug keys why take a Feral druid over a Rogue of some kind for shroud?
It has nothing to do with Treants or Innervate, and everything to do with pugs being based around assuming everyone in your group is of average or below average skill and working with that. A WW or Boomkin of average skill is going to outDPS a Feral of average skill, and there’s not a quick and easy way to tell if the person you’re inviting is good or bad.
The answer will always be “Find a community or static M+ group” until/unless there are significant changes made to the M+ systems and 5 man content in WoW.
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The player may not be bad, but for m+, the spec is bad.
All things being equal there’s 6-8 specs that will statistically pull 2k more DPS. Over the course of an instance that’s more of an opportunity cost than not bringing hero/lust.
So if feral was the only class with lust, you still might be better off bringing another spec.
Perception is funny. Had a group boot me and a healer when I said I don’t boomy and I’ve had a group leader say they’d take a feral over a brain dead boomy any time.
I do not think there are melee DPS specs that will pull that far ahead of an equal geared feral at a key level that matters.
I could be wrong. I don’t pursue M+ for any reason and have no interest in doing so, but I’ve seen several high level Ferals who more than hold their own in 20+ keys (Fore, Maystine).
Did you look at the link in the OP.
If you look at the top parses, the best wind walker beats out the best feral by more than 4k DPS in some dungeons.
2k is the conservative average from parses that throw out those outliers.
+15s are too low, what does it look like if you go up to 20s (on my phone and can’t easily check for myself)
And the data from 20’s as of this week for monk and feral.
| Spec | 25th Avg | % | DOS | HoA | MoTS | NW | PF | SD | SoA | ToP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windwalker | 10,130 | 100 | 10,502 | 11,119 | 11,070 | 11,610 | 8,498 | 11,325 | 8,512 | 8,411 |
| Feral | 7406 | 70 | 7,177 | 7,754 | 8,201 | 7,989 | 6,681 | 7,752 | 6,730 | 6,967 |
And that’s a comparison of the 25th best parse for each dungeon.
See this argument a lot. Turns out the specs don’t all of the sudden wildly scale into balance. In most cases they scale further out of balance.
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I pug 19s. The differences you’re posting don’t actually exist in the keys I’m in.
The worst I ever got beat on overall was by an ele shaman with several points of ilevel on me, in a HOA where the tank triple pulled the first 5 pulls.
I beat him on ST every single time, but I couldn’t catch up on overall. That was 14k vs 10k (I don’t log, and nobody I else know logs M+, which is the other problem with this thread.)
In general, if I get beat on overall it’s by 20% at most, and it’s in AOE heavy dungeons by AOE heavy classes who cannot keep up in ST.
Otherwise, it’s closer, and from time to time I’m the top DPS. Especially in ST heavy places like Theater and Spires. Even NW with some of the most batspit pulling I’ve ever seen in there, it shook out to 11k average for all the dps in the group, and there was a fire mage getting fed PI in that. The differences were about 1% from each other on overall.
While I think Feral could be better, and I definitely think that playing Feral well in M+ is harder than most specs, I don’t think the real world differences are quite as bad as the tiny slice that gets logged says they are. These aren’t like raid dps charts where nearly every raid gets logged. I certainly don’t experience those kinds of differences personally, and I am pretty far from the top ferals of the world.
Only DPS data you have is
`https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/zuljin/mokon?zone=25&new=true#boss=12293&metric=dps&spec=Feral
6500 in ToP which is near the top end for feral but ToP and SoA are the two dungeons where every spec seems to suffer
Would be nice if we had more data, but this is the data we got and for that dungeon 6900 is were it shows ferals clustering.
I’m a tad lower than you and see mostly mid 6k overalls. But I do see a lot of other specs pulling off 9k and occasionally 10k overall.
And there’s runs were my 6-7k DPS puts me at the top, but those usually end up being bad runs.
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“Keys that matter” is highly subjective. +15 is the item level cap for the great vault, so it definitely matters. Sure, Feral will do better in +20s where things will live longer and sure you’ll outdps players below your skill level. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that we’re just worse at dungeons than most specs in general.
If the only Feral problem was community perception, we’d see a handful of Ferals with fixed groups pushing up to +25-26 keys. The spec is just bad at burst AoE and our great ST just won’t make up for it.
I don’t think anyone is asking for Feral to have WW levels of AoE. Of course not. We just want to have some AoE burst. Even if it’s attached to our 3min CD, it would make the spec feel a lot better in this type of content.
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The “15’s don’t matter” argument if fairly bunk.
The methodology is the same for every spec, the data for every spec clusters at about the same point and when you do look at the data for 20’s the same trends are there. As mentioned early, the specs don’t suddenly scale into balance in 20’s.
Looking at the top parses you have to assume that what ever the best situation for spec A is, that’s what happened for that parse. Whatever the best situation for spec B is, that’s what happened for that parse. And if you look at the 25th best parse, where the damage numbers start to cluster, you can get a good idea of what a specs average top end potential is.
And there is just more data for 15’s. In 20’s there’s only 70-80 parses for ferals in some dungeons.
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I actually think it’ll help… but not by a lot. They’re uncapping swipe so that means we have more targets to get crits on for Primal Fury. Should help with combo point generation.
Wow, you found a logged run. I actually went looking at one point to see if anybody had actually logged any of mine during an earlier discussion and didn’t find any. But that TOP is relatively recent, and was one that got screwed up by the tank accidentally pulling a gasbag with the frost lieutenant in the small hallway. I remember that, because we probably would have timed that run without that mistake.
Other note, There’s an asterix next to my parse saying 38 parses for ilevel. The overall is 452 parses for feral.
Ele has 2540 parses.
By comparison, Feral which is underrepresnted everywhere, had 2520 H Sylvanas parses as of my last kill on her.
So a super common M+ spec barely has more M+ parses than a super uncommon raid spec at what is probably similar difficulty content.
Which is the problem with M+ log percents. Representative sample size is messy.
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I don’t understand the post a few back. 14k versus 10k and the difference isn’t that huge??? That’s 4K. Am I missing something?
Also, ST in an overall dungeon adds up to what, 25% of a dungeon and that leaves 75% AOE? Like others have said, feral gets beat routinely by 2-3k “overall” in a dungeon with equally skilled, equally geared players. Overall DPS is the thing that matters most, to most people… That is not community perception. That is reality backed up by data. No one cares about anyone’s mini game they play in their own head of keeping count who beat whom on ST…
It is fairly big. But it’s also the single biggest difference I’ve ever encountered. (Note in case you haven’t been following, my dps numbers are from recount, Thequixote has been quoting Warcraft Logs which divides damage out over the entire dungeon)
The proportion of ST depends on the dungeon.
For example, the Spires I did today had a mage and a hunter who started out massively ahead of me due to the opening pull and a few other big ones. But after the ST fest that is Ophy through Devos We were all within 2% of each other because I stomped them on the last two bosses and 2 of the minibosses.
That 40% difference was from mega-pulling in HoA. And that exceeded what I could make back up on boss damage.
The thing you also have to remember about damage profiles is that for the TIMER, overall damage done is king.
However, if you’re on something like a Tyran week and the boss either wipes you because you can’t ST it fast enough, or you just lose massive amounts of time on a cycle based boss like Ingra Maloch, all the AOE in the world may not save you, because you may not have access to large enough pulls (maze in Mists), or you may not be able to survive pulls large enough (NW) to make up the difference. Especially if the runback sucks (ToP).
It’s been quite apparent to me that I’ve gotten into pugs to carry the ST portion because the other 2 dps are AOE monster specs but the bosses still need to die and the group lead knows it.
14k would require a fight in the 30 second range. My character sims at 19k for a 20 seconds fight and 8.5k for a 3 minute fight. But that’s a patchwerk sim.
In my experience I can pull off a DPS runaway on a mini boss if my convoke and beserk are up. But on a boss, especially on tyrannical, a lot of classes can more than keep up with ferals in long fights.
Even in raid we’re not scaling great and are just upper middle of the pack right now and I think we have to give up a lot more single target for m+ set ups.
I love feral and truly wish it was better.
However, the fact is, despite the hype of a few, and one or two hand picked scenarios, we all know the state of feral in dungeons. Overall, we can do “ok” when others are not decked out with the best gear from all content, drunk, or even half blind. Yes, we can best the bottom of the barrel of other classes. Yes, with our convoke burst we can look good on single target if everyone is strong in it as well and the boss fights are really short. Otherwise, we give headway to the more blessed specs and competent players. There are other specs out there that beat us in both ST and AOE without sacrificing much either way.
Hopefully something comes our way for 9.1.5 that helps change things around a little. It would be nice to see feral make it to mid pack status rather than bringing up the rear.
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Quick question fellas, is necro competitive in pve for feral or is the consensus that they should be NF?
Appears to be convoke across the board
`https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/28#metric=dps&partition=1&class=Druid&boss=0&spec=Feral
Compared to
`https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/28#metric=dps&partition=1&class=Druid&spec=Feral&covenant=2
M+ is the same