Long time feral mains, what do you miss?

After enjoying feral so much in retail, I decided to give classic feral a shot while we’re waiting for DF.

As expected it feels vastly different from retail. Much less refined but a lot more nuanced.

Got me thinking, what do you veteran ferals miss from previous iterations of the spec?

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In all honesty, pre-wrath feral is more of a cheese spec than anything else. You abuse mechanics to do better. That said, when you can do it, it is quite fun. However, too many people know how to properly play now and some of the cheese-osity is lost.

Wrath feral is what I truly miss. It is when the spec felt at its best. I still fondly remember hitting 75 and suddenly feeling like all the potential of it coming into place. I hope that it will retain that sense of completeness and not be as easier than I remember. I will not deny Cata added in some nice QoL stuff, like having an actual interrupt that didnt use combo points. However, Wrath was when the spec seemed at its best to me.

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P-O-W-E-R-S-H-I-F-T-I-N-G!!!

I miss it so much. :sob:

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The fact that none of you have said anything about the old bite sound is dissapointing.

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I miss the rot style gameplay. Cata/Mop and maybe Wod i thought were peak feral.
Im prob in the minority here but i loved bfa feral, sabertooth fully refreshing rip and the spammy fast paced gameplay with bfa zerk. Oh and old bloodtalons…not a fan of the SL version

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i miss the Legion Artifact powers " Ashamane’s Bite " and " Open Wounds" and " Shadow Thrash "

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I miss stronger bleeds and bite being more for short fights or burning energy and combos between rips.

I also really prefer the old Blood Talons (but honestly feral felt better to me before BT ever existed).

Sometime between Wrath and MoP was my favorite.

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I miss the Avatar of ashamane form. Humanoid cat was awesome

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From mostly observation, since I hardly play anymore, I feel like since Legion, Feral Aoe has been the big miss. Like something is always off with AoE. And with mythic +, it got magnified even more. Correct me if I’m wrong though. Just feel like feral AoE has never had an iconic AoE ability that has helped it out. Maybe it never had a future hope because cat form stole swipe from bear form in wrath, when they should’ve made something unique? Idk what the problem can be pinpointed to, but AoE has always felt like it’s been the problem.

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Old-school PvP. Like pre-HWL weapon and DR days. Warriors could one or two-shot you with crits but you could literally just root them to death if you could get the casts off. There’s an argument to be made that it was fair in-so-far that Spider Belt pretty much guaranteed a kill on a 30m CD which was insanely strong in world PvP. I can’t see situation where DR goes away because people don’t play the game to not play the game (if that makes sense). But the introduction of DR and the existence of different forms of CC, in combination with PvP balance being centered around group play, means that not only do you have to have friends to have a fun or meaningful PvP experience but they have to play the ‘right’ classes or you’re playing the wrong one. So true balance is either full homogenization or back to rock-paper-scissors-mushroom[classic-era warlocks]. Instead we get neither. It’s fine and I’m sure there’s a lot of people who prefer the current control->burst style of PvP but it’s not for me as I’m staunchly in the bring-the-player-not-the-class camp. Probably best left as a memory though.

Feral were AoE burst gods in WotLK just spamming Swipe. John-effing-Madden style play sucked though. I’m not sure if I’d be open to that style making a comeback if it meant having reasonable AoE capabilities. But if M+ remains an important form of endgame content, I think I’d put up with it.

Casting Rebirth/Cyclone from cat form.

Pulling from ranged with Feral Faerie Fire from like 30/36yds for free on a short CD.

Powershifting.

Tranquility as a CD. But I agree that created situations where feral had to ‘sacrifice’ time and dps to cast which was disruptive and unfun in raids.

Symbiosis to an extent; some abilities were not as good as others such as Soul Swap vs Redirect and sometimes you cast it on a target because of the spell the other person got. This created situations where you would want, say, Feral Spirits but gave it to the Spriest because Tranquility was a free huge ‘oh poop’ button and you’d never really use Dispersion.

Nature’s Vigil (Which looks like it’s coming back in Dragonflight! Legit excited.)

DISPLACER BEAST.

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I miss leader of the pack.

Off topic, I also miss the meme beam.

I hate all of the new feral sound effects.

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Hey blizz put in a lot of work tearing pieces of paper into apple headphones.

I miss not being a bite bot and your main dmg coming from dots. I also miss coming out of form not being on GCD which made shifting out of roots a lot smoother. Also miss tank and dps being in the same tree so you could make hybrids.

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Any opportunity to complain about the new feral sounds, I’m taking it.

I would honestly rather them replace them all with hunter sounds. And not the animal ones. Give me huge gun shots every time I bite. That would break my immersion less than what we have now.

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I saw your character icon and legit thought it was me for a sec.

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Are you two twins?

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LOL SAME. I was gonna comment on it but thought I was tripping hahahah

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i miss my dmg

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I miss Displacer Beast.

I miss Cower (It would be really nice to have with Convoke being “Pray the tank can hold threat off 4 bites and a FF in a 2 second window” 5 seconds into the pull.)

I miss Bite being an execute.

I miss -true- Snapshotting.

I miss rebirth in cat form (There is 0 reason we shouldn’t be able to do this-make it cost energy like DK for all I care)

I miss powershifting to drop roots (I do not miss it for gaining energy, that playstyle needs to stay dead.)

Speaking of dead, I miss Play Dead. I miss the utility I could give my friends with Symbiosis.

I miss Feral Treants.

I miss Leader of the Pack.

But most of all, I miss weapon effects that changed my Cat Form ( Fandral’s Flamescythe, Kiril, Fury of Beasts) and still left me as a ‘cat’.

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I miss my bleeds mattering for anything other than other than buffing my bite.
Farie fire,
Mangle bleed amp,
Shifting off the gcd,
If a tank went down I miss being able to pop bear form and actually tank for a minute instead of just getting one shot by a boss in bear.
Innervate restoring mana not just being a long clear casting,
I really miss the devs actually reading our forum responses. Seriously the alpha feedback thread is insulting at this point.

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