/shrug looking at just yesterday feral is only top DPS on Freya which is also a gimmick fight, but since you are throwing out the fights that don’t support your narrative I guess we exclude that one too. They’re 2-3 on a few fights and still dropping way down on others like mim.
So once again not seeing a problem.
90th percentile Feral is top on Freya and pretty much top 3 on every other non-gimmick fight. Also the best melee on Vezax by a wide margin. In general pretty much the best melee in the game right now.
The problem is twofold.
One, the spec was already solid and relatively competitive and yet got a major throughput buff while other specs face bigger issues and aren’t even acknowledged.
Two, it is now projected to outscale pretty much every other melee by a decent margin when it was already expected to be top 3 melee for later phases.
The buff was simply inane and not thought through very well.
LoL it was only solid and competitive in your super selective boss sampling that happens to specifically favor being able to stand still behind the boss.
It favors being able to actually get behind the boss, so pretty much every fight except for Kologarn and also doesn’t involve extreme caster buffs such as Vezax or correctly done Hodir.
This is not selective as it simply filters the fights where either every melee has issues or melee with positional requirements do.
But if you believe a 1 minute gimmick boss like Kologarn matters in any way that’d explain quite a lot.
And stay behind them, and never switch targets, and never have to stop attacking long enough that a timer will drop off. So yeah super cherry picked fights.
Freya involves switching targets, Feral is #1.
Feral is the #3 melee for Mimiron, behind specs which favor cleave fights due to their inherent mechanics (Fury and Combat).
So, top 2 single target, top 3 cleave, top aoe. Why was this needed if Feral was already solid on those fights? Nobody knows.
It’s also not the only spec that loses major chunks of dps when it has to swap targets or drops a dot, yet it outperforms for example Combat by a wide margin.
Again, for absolutely 0 reason.
Wait till you see what boomkin dots don’t do.
Freya seems to be because detonating lashers, which happen to be one of the few times feral aoe works.
And no feral is way low on mim, once again looking at the logs right now.
But yeah no duh on a short fight like thorim where feral can sit behind them and just burn feral did well, and now does better.
So once again not seeing a problem with feral doing good on some fights.
I actually thought bear weaving was a really cool play-style with a high skill cap that felt very druid-y. It’s kind of what I would expect out of an RPS DPS rotation as a general rule.
It’s unfortunate that it was removed, but also that the other DPS didn’t have the same complexity. I do wish Blizzard would have found a way to keep that playstyle while still buffing feral dps. It’s actually a bit of a shame that it’s gone. I was never very good at bear-weaving, but I feel like that’s what separated the really skilled feral players from the rest.
What would have been interesting is that if they made Mangle-Bear grant a kitty only version of OoC (or something like that) to promote that shifting playstyle. It’s still a buff for ferals and promotes the more complex rotation.
Flower-weaving though… that was a gimmick that needed to go. Burning a reagent to maximize dps in this way was absolutely a bug and needed to get fixed.
*EDIT: On second thought, they probably could have just made Mangle-Bear always grant OoC instead of FFF. It’s not like it would change anything for bears and it would still accomplish what I suggested, no special version of OoC required.
#3 melee on a fight that involves severe handicaps to melee due to positioning or simply p3 downtime isn’t “low”.
It’s also #2 melee on Algalon, a long fight (which somewhat normalises dps rng) with hard downtime in intervals.
So it’s not “some fights”, it’s pretty much all of them except for the gimmick ones such as Kologarn, Hodir or Vezax.
On all Ulduar fights except for those Feral was already very solid.
Thus the buff was over the top and unnecessary, and hopefully will be reverted next phase or sooner.
I agree. It’s like stance dancing for Warriors. Really fits the RP of the class.
Sure the concept of bear weaving might have been nifty, the actual mechanics of it were completely janky and annoying to do. Glad it’s been nerfed by simply not being worth it anymore.
I would have preferred if they actually had properly designed a hybrid class and there were actually encounters that benefited from having a fluid kitty/bear. Using bear as a gimmick was lame.
/shrug you keep throwing in extra criteria, these fights don’t count, on these fights we can only look at these classes…
Those are not extra criteria. You cannot look at the overall damage when bosses like Hodir and Vezax exist and you cannot gauge the performance of a spec with heavy positional requirements by looking at Kologarn.
It’s simply basic integrity, which is apparently very rare here.
I dunno, I kinda liked it. I didn’t really find it janky at all either. Shifting into bear gives you rage, drop a maul and a lacerate, back into kitty to maintain buffs. The challenge of it, and where I consistently struggled, was keeping lacerate rolling while still keeping my kitty bleeds going. This is where the skill comes into play though, and I freely admit that this was something I needed to work on and get better.
I didn’t find it janky at all. As for annoying… well, I guess it depends on your perspective. If you embrace it as a playstyle that adds complexity to your rotation, it’s not annoying. If you just wanna smash one button and top charts like rogues, then I guess?
The main reason I like feral is because it’s a much more interesting DPS spec than so many in WotLK, regardless of performance. The changes here don’t really change that in a relative sense, but it did diminish that complexity somewhat.
The more I think about it, the more I think bear-weaving was a value-add for the class… but it sure was a lot of work for not a lot of result. I wonder if your annoyance with it would have been the same if it had a much larger impact than it did.
Further to this - a better buff would have been to take shifting off the Global cooldown. Embrace the playstyle rather than break it. That would have been a moderate dps buff and a good way to reward effort.
There were some people who thought it was fun. I’m betting a lot more people didn’t, I found it stupid and janky. The new rotation is a lot smoother but you’re still hitting just about as many buttons. BEar weaving was only there to fill in down time while pooling energy and occasionally refresh mangle.
I like actually using kitty abilities when I’m dpsing.
I can’t imagine that’s true… you’ve swapped out bear form, maul (sometimes mangle), and lacerate for FFF. It’s only one more button on top of what you would have done before if you ignored bear weaving.
What gave you the impression that I believe otherwise?
Employing the bear weaving technique did not prevent you from pressing your kitty buttons. In fact, if you didn’t, you were negating any advantage bear weaving would have given you in the first place.
This would not even be a buff since bearweaving was not at all gcd deamanding and bear swipe which would be the extra gcd is really bad.
I don’t play this dumpster or an expansion, but Feral was back in 08 the hardest class to play with the highest skill cap and a top DPS when played well, it wasn’t that in Classic until buffed due to every other class requiring only 1 hand and a 2 digit IQ.
They should let ferals be at the top like they were for most of OG wrath.