It’s hilarious, every m+ season it’s the same thing: a bunch of morons claiming that the spec is comparable to top performers. Nobody is cherry picking anything but you people. When you consider the logs, the sims, and the representation all together feral doesn’t compete. This has been the case literally every m+ season.
If feral were actually good for keys don’t you think more people would actually run that? In this game of people constantly min-maxing they’re going to use what actually works well. And guess what, if the top players are doing it then so will the mediocre ones. So, it’s not like there’s some secret regarding feral in which it’s just magically overlooked by the WoW community.
It’s bottom tier, and it’s bottom tier because it’s not as good of an option as alternatives. It’s not that complicated.
Actually the representation explains much of the rest.
It would have to be better than the easier classes. Feral has a very high skill ceiling. One of my guildies is feral and i’d put him against anyone you know. He’ll stomp them in overall and i’ll bet gold cap on that.
That said, not sure why you’re ranting at me, I wasn’t talking about feral at all.
Sorry, it’s just when I see a feral thread I tend to get triggered after 5+ years of it being neglected by the devs for m+. I wasn’t sure who to respond to out of the half a dozen or so people on here trying to justify it being bottom tier again, and your name was the unlucky winner.
But yeah, I don’t doubt your friend is good. There are a lot of really good ferals out there, some posting in this very thread. The thing is though, if you put them up against any equivalently skilled WW monk, for example, they will get destroyed in a key.
The spec has been so grossly underdeveloped to the point that the world’s #3 feral even posted a manifesto during 9.0 outlining all of the major problems. If someone that skilled is complaining about the spec then surely this isn’t just a high-ceiling issue. Now, I will admit 9.1 is probably the best feral has been for m+, and yet the spec is still at the bottom in representation. Even if you ignore the average and just look at the top feral logs, they are still less than even the 25th parse-average performance of competitors. If you don’t trust the logs then look at the sims. If you don’t trust all of that data in conjunction with IO then I don’t know what to tell you.
It’s a shame because a lot of the ferals clearing just 18s should be clearing around 21+. The highest key cleared by a feral is a 24, and that’s 16 parses, contrasted with a WW’s 2,000+ at that level. Every spec in the game has cleared a 25 but feral. It’s not a skill ceiling issue, it’s a class design issue… mostly a dps issue, but also impactful utility issue, both of which make the spec less valuable to bring than other options.
Yes and no. Some specs are meant to be ST nukers, which can aid the group’s overall success. I’d gladly bring a spec that does 72% of the best performance if it meant it shaved an extra boss mechanic from going off because they brought the dps to nuke it down before it could be cast again. Especially on tyrannical weeks when that’s pass/fail for groups when all defensives are spent and another big aoe damage burst is about to wipe the party.
Overall DPS helps, sure, but it’s not the only mechanic. You’ll still find feral druids in the all +20s range.
Ferals biggest problem is basically that it has to compete with Boomkin. Boomkin brings everything Feral does to the table and trees and is ranged and has a better damage profile.
It’s the same issue with SV Hunters compared to MM or BM. Even if SV is good, people aren’t going to play it if MM and BM are just as good.
Ferals compete for melee interrupt spots. Range usually has hunters and mages.
And really most of the time pugs don’t know your spec. I manage to pug a lot by not volunteering I’m melee unless it’s a melee unfriendly affixes and the group doesn’t have ranged.
It’s the damage. M+ is do X damage in Y amount of time. You don’t out utility it, you out gear it and out damage it.
Utility helps on the margins but for the most part utility and mechanics are just a binary, you either successfully execute or you don’t. And that’s true no matter your spec.
But lack of damage means fights last longer, more mechanics need to be dealt with, healers need more endurance, and you create more chances for mistakes.
You can really see this on bosses like the first boss of NW. If you don’t kill it quickly you run out space and start butt pulling stuff.
Did you read anything I said at all? I said that single target damage can be more important in some cases. Yes, it can help to prevent things like running out of room, or a third aoe death spell by the boss, or another wave of adds, etc etc. People run out of cooldowns. So yeah, someone might be doing 1.5k dps less on trash, but if they are doing 2-3k more dps than everyone on the single target boss, it can potential make or break a boss fight. Basically, it balances out.
Ferals single target isn’t all that amazing unless the fight is 30 seconds long. The big AoE specs seem quite capable of giving up some AoE and do just as good in 2 minute boss fights and still kill on AoE.
Specs have to compete with specs within their class that share the same role. The better one spec is, the less desirable the other specs become.
This is especially apparent when you’ve got ranged and melee DPS within the same class, if the melee spec does not bring something major to the table that the ranged specs do not.
Even if Feral had an equal damage profile to Balance, it’d still struggle to be a relevant spec since Balance does everything it does and then some.
If we’re not using shroud of concealment and sap, we have two stuns, same interrupt, battle rez, battle healing, typhoon which is super helpful for kiting and spiteful, and soothe.
Rogues bring blind? Which can help in emergency but it’s kind of like sheep, just gets busted. Single target root is probably more effective on melee mobs at least.
As for this idea that utility matters so much…
What would you predict if a group went into a +20 in 200 ilvl gear. The utility will be the same, but the damage wont be. What would you predict?
Except you wouldn’t know because you haven’t done anything higher than a 15, which in this current patch, are an absolute joke. Might as well be running 12-13s from last season because that’s how hard they are this patch.
Except interrupt, which becomes far more important in high keys.
There’s nothing a Feral can bring that measures up to Shroud and Shroud strats are absolutely huge in M+. Especially when so many of the things Feral has are replicated on Boomy/Resto/Guardian as well. Who put you in charge of discounting this utility of Shroud?
Like I said,
No serious group would go into a +20 with ilvl 200, they wouldn’t even be able to push a key to +20 if they were all ilvl 200.