Feral is my favorite spec. M+ is my favorite activity. Please kill me.
Recent M+ gaming experience…
Legion: nobody wanted feral.
BFA: nobody wanted feral.
SL: nobody wants feral.
Fun fact: I can go balance with my agi weapon and trinkets and do comparable AoE. I don’t want to go balance. Don’t make me go balance.
well, I NEVER.
How dare you try to play what you want to play there is no room for that here
did you not SIM before committing ?
You play what the guides tell you, not what you want! you can’t pull that extra 0.85% dps ? get out of my key.
World of Simcraft 2021
meaningful choices, brother
I think the issue is that people want balance > feral because ranged/innervate/trees.
Your point is valid, but it isn’t a case that feral is bad in M+ by any means. Just not meta, and will likely never be meta.
The utility imbalance really is bizarre. In my opinion:
Typhoon baseline again.
1 min Stampeding Roar baseline for Feral
Stampeding Roar => Feral Affinity
Ursol’s Vortex => Bear Affinity
Innervate => Resto Affinity
Force of Nature => Balance Affinity
Replace FoN in balance talents with somethin.
Feral Affinity damage increased like 5% + access to Primal Wrath.
Feral, specced for Primal Wrath, has always done fine in my M+ groups.
Therein lies the problem
Make your own groups so you can get some IO. Use that IO to get into good groups.
I know that you feel like you get declined from everything but thats like everyone…even meta DPS. There is usually like 30 dps that sign up to every key that I make.
It doesn’t matter what your IO is, if you’re a feral and you’re applying to a 14 or higher you’re getting declined, and often even for lower keys too. And the problem now is most of the competent players and/or meta specs aren’t doing anything less than a 14, so you are left with riffraff from which to choose.
Example: just ran SoA. Invited a ~900 IO MM who wouldn’t target explosives and wouldn’t soak orbs on third boss, then leaves key immediately after first wipe, stating that the group sucks. We still had like 15 min. This is what you get to deal with once left behind in the dust.
I pugged my way to 4k as feral in Legion. And that was the era of Balance+Afflock+Melee. The secret was making sure that I worked at having a good io. I ran everything on as high keys as I could. I capped out not because of spec, but because I hit my personal skillcap, and didn’t raid enough mythic content to increase my gearcap.
(I skipped most of BFA and mostly played my original main which is my warrior.)
I don’t actually have a problem with any M+ I’ve done recently, but I’m not playing at quite the same level as I was then.
A good IO actually does help. Even when asked “Balance?”, and your answer is no, your io score holds enough weight to show you know what you’re doing and can carry yourself.
At least that was my experience in BfA (haven’t played enough in SL to really say, but Ferals are in an even better spot now than they were in BfA)
To be fair, the difference was that balance wasn’t great for a lot of BFA. Was popular early on.
Right now, ferals are getting slammed because there is another dps spec on the same class that is performing amazingly.
While that’s true, Balance was still the favored DPS role for Druids the entire expansion.
And that was even with 2 melee 1 range being the meta set up. And currently with 50 DPS signing up per key, it’s not hard to pick a spec that outclassed Feral for that melee spot.
But gear/io appropriate the the level your asking to join does help. I hated having to grind that 4-7 range when I had first come back. I know the dungeons, I know the affixes, the only true mile markers were 4, 7, 10, 15. Anything in between was okay to be skipped 