Loss of extra melee range feels like giga crap.
New Tiger’s Fury feels like crap. Might as well get rid of it at this point.
Bloodtalons somehow feels even worse than it was - probably because of energy regen nerfs - and it’s felt like crap forever.
Gameplay outside of major cooldowns feels like crap.
Random procs are the tattered pieces of gorilla tape holding our damage together at this point.
I tolerate it because thematically the class overall is still my jam. As a joiner in late Legion, feral feels the worst it’s felt since S1 BFA before we had Primal Wrath. Damage output feels like it’s been on a downward slide since S2 Dragonflight but at least the gameplay was tolerable, and the changes leading into TWW have left me scratching my head.
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They said they wanted to get away from us being a spam fest more or less. They wanted us to go into the niche of priorty target focus. And by extension of that, making us choose our finisher by having it actually matter by taking away infinite snapshotting and infinite energy.
So now instead of spamming PW back to back and having Rip rolling for 18 seconds on all mobs, we have to decide where our damage is going to go.
Do we need a long Rip on a target? Do we need to AoE this pack down? Do we need a TF charged Bite on a priority target to also get Sabertooth rolling, etc etc
Yup, it still doesn’t feel as impactful to press though as say, my shadow priest’s void torrent. Even in PvE just doing world quests against elites void torrent will straight up delete them whereas feral frenzy + bite definitely doesn’t feel the same, despite both being similar cooldowns.
I just don’t have any buttons I can press on my feral that feel like a big hit outside of berserk.
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Yeah that’s by design. Feral has rarely had a big damage cooldown outside of berserk, and even some iterations of berserk were pretty mid. This has some upside as well though - feral oftentimes carries damage during the times when burst specs are waiting for their cooldowns to come back up. How many times have you been in a group where the first pull was dead 20 seconds but then the next 3 pulls before the boss took 50 seconds? When it’s tuned to be okay, a group with a feral oftentimes will have a 30 second first pull but then the next 3 pulls are 40 seconds each.
If they removed snapshotting from feral completly the class would be in a better position, yes I know there is a small cult of people that love it but every other class was better off without it
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What is going to replace it? Without snapshotting, feral druid is a pretty barebones spec with minimal cooldowns. While I personally like snapshotting, I am happy to have a discussion on its removal and what could replace it. But I have no interest in feral returning to being nothing but a stripped down sin rogue again.
Snapshotting is the whole dynamic that makes the class fun to play. No feral wants it to be removed. It would ruin the fantasy.
But thats what they want. A sin rogue or a fury warrior but painted orange
My main issue with snapshotting is that it doesn’t seem to align all that well with the frenetic nature of Mythic Plus. Extremely high keys might be the exception here, but I don’t think Blizz should be doing class design around content done by a relatively small percentage of the player base anyway, but I digress. That’s a topic for a different discussion.
Ultimately, I often feel like the payoff for properly snapshotting my bleeds in M+ gets trampled down by burst AoE classes like Ret Paladin, Warriors, Havoc, and probably a couple others. I put all this careful work into my bleeds when they can faceroll their keyboard and do more damage. Just… bleh.
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That’s a risk for any DoT based spec, regardless whether the spec has snapshotting. Sin rogue and affliction warlock are both heavily impacted by short duration pulls.
It doesn’t take extremely high keys for enemies to start living long enough for snapshotting to play a factor. Of course, this will depend what you consider extremely high and the rest of your group. I’ve found that even as low as +15 in the old scaling system (+5 in TWW) feral could carry a key. But if your group is a solid 15 item levels above the key level you’re doing, those 10 second trash pulls will ruin your DPS.
Random Brust damage sucks.
Bleed spec is solid. Playing without thrash in pvp is so nice.
Really enjoying it, its a bit strong. Beserk feels like a big cooldown now which i really like. love pressing it and my bleeds go crazy
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