And now I’m sad again.
Overall the Feral tree is ok in terms of what’s in it. I’m happy Swarm, Sudden Ambush, Apex, and Circle will return from Shadowlands. As well as the usual fun talents like Lunar, Feral Frenzy etc. There’s also a lot of great potential builds I see and synergies, e.g. Savage Roar + SOTF. Swarm + FF/LI, Circle + Apex, Symmetry+Pred and so on.
What I dislike:
Infected Wounds (20% disease slow) is a complete waste of space and talent, and is necessary to unlock Symmetry (and later Convoke). Its so bad compared to Pred Swiftness and Survival Instincts. It should just be baseline honestly and make that row 2 options (PS, SI).
Taste for Blood (Ferocious Bite increased dmg per bleed) is pretty much universally hated, its dull and makes target switching feel bad. You can do better here.
Sabertooth - with the amount of energy regen talents in the tree, Rip is going to be permanent. This talent is also extremely controversial and very much disliked so I’m particularly surprised its been included. I guess you could always turn it back to execute-only and that’d be fine.
Draught - annoying that it discourages multi-dotting. I don’t like Draught at all. But I do think something here that increases single target DOT dmg would be good. E.g. after biting a target it adds a mangle-like effect for a short period.
I also think Circle and Draught (if it stays) is too far away from the left side (DOTs), e.g. things like Lunar Inspiration (an absolutely great talent we want to play) would depend too much on these talents but they’re very difficult to access being on the opposite side and so far down.
Beyond these complaints I think there’s a lot of great choices. I think removing Infected Wounds will also allow us to cross over to different sides of the tree, so Lunar can access Circle/Draught easier, among other benefits.
The one additional thing from Shadowlands I wish was included was the conduit Incessant Hunter, but no biggie.
Savage Roar also kills Owlweaving which is awesome; having SOTF and other energy regen talents will make it easy/smooth to play. Really good stuff.
Adaptive Swarm I assume the 2 additional talents are for the legendary split effect? If this is not included that would be a shame, because that effect is what has made so many love Swarm.
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You’ll need 2 points in carnivorous instinct to get bloodtalons but only 2 in carnivorous or fearful symmetry to get adaptive swarm.
I still think connecting brutal slash and primal wrath from berserk in the center is the easiest solution since it gives a high point to pivot from the center for any build and it currently just dead ends the center where all the other specs have a good connector point. Waiting til infected wounds to cross limits too many options.
That’s not at all what was said in the interviews back during the announcement period, so some clarification would be nice.
I was counting Sudden Ambush as a cost to get BT/Predatory Swiftness as well. If I wasn’t specifically aiming for BT in raids, I’d skip Sudden Ambush, Primal Wrath, Predatory Swiftness, Carnivorous Instinct, and of course BT itself. That means BT costs 8 points. (assuming you need to fill out multinodes completely)
Especially since I have no idea who is so excited for Infected Wounds. What builds is that a central piece of?
they also got rid of 2 talent types and made way more baseline;like rebirth. it’s a work in progress so until its testable, best to give feedback on what they’ve posted latest.
PVP maybe, bear has it as a talent too but its much higher and not a pivot point.
Still surprised that wasn’t added back into Feline Adept.
We were able to cast it in form in BFA until the Feline/Ursine adept change and it wasn’t mentioned in the dev commentary for it. So I consider it a stealth nerf. Plus they didn’t put it back on Predatory Swiftness like it was before it became instant cast in Legion either. So now we’re the only Druid spec that has to shapeshift in order to use Rebirth and I don’t understand why that is.
At least they gave us Innervate, which was my other main complaint about Balance vs. Feral utility in SL.
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Yes, designers have no idea how feral supposed to be played and force us into this bloodtalons/ferocious bite/convoke meta. Bleeds do less than 9% of your total damage, that is ridiculous.
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The 30/31 points is level 70 not 60 meaning we will be missing 10 points of what we currently have when pre-patch goes live, its going to be 26/25 for those 2 weeks. Not that pre-patch balance matters to much but it’ll feel off for sure.
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That’s not going to be the meta with this tree. BT and the Bite talents are on opposite sides and Convoke is deep in the middle. You won’t be able to get them all.
Definitely agree with this. I’d almost suggest that IW would make more sense as a class talent on the Feral/Guardian side of the tree rather than a Feral specific talent. Maybe as a crossover node between Feline Swiftness and Thick Hide?
Then maybe move SotF up to take its place and put something else where SotF is now?
I dunno, I feel like it’s in the correct spot opposite Apex. Apex feels bleh on one target but gets better when you add more targets, whereas Draught is one target only. I’m happy with being able to easily make that choice on a per-encounter basis.
If my math is right you can go a full DoT build if you drop the Zerk enhancements and don’t go for Convoke.
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Draught is the only legendary that is being played by ferals in PvP, there is no alternative to it.
Also, no Leader of the Pack talent, they are definitely listening to feral/druid community lol.
The main irritant I’m having is that the prereqs for a lot of abilities just don’t make sense to me. I can easily make the build I want if I’m allowed to ignore the prereqs but a lot of synergistic talents (Circle of Life and Death + LI/Primal Wrath, Apex + Primal Wrath…) are really far away from each other. And of course Infected Wound occupies prime real estate in the center of the tree so it feels more like a tax than anything else.
3 Likes
you guys really need to improve cultivation if you want players to pick the ability. It’s not competetive with anything in the row - Nourish is weak as well.
There’s plenty of ways to make it an interesting pick! Like having cultivation be consumable by a swiftmend.
I’d also make Nourish being able to refresh lifebloom baseline as a start(as in earlier versions).
can’t wait til the caluclators are out! then i’ll make a real review 
There are quite a few massive issues with feral’s tree, but I will just touch on a few of them.
- Row two: Couldn’t traits such as Increased Energy just already be baseline? I mean, omen of clarity actually changes how the rotation works. IE contributes very little. Even Improved Tiger’s fury could be baked into tigers fury and there is two spots right there that are resource oriented that could be used to make the spec more interesting.
- Row Three: Whats with Improved Shred? Bake it into shred already. If your in feral spec you should already have innate improvements like that. Get rid of Scent of Blood, it was garbage back in the day and its still garbage. Whats with the choice node? Its not bleed verse direct damage, its Tigers fury verse direct damage. If you want to keep Predator, fine, just move it where Improved Shred is, bake that in, and provide with a new bleed-oriented choice that counters Sabertooth.
- Row four: This row is complete garbo. Improved Prowl, should be named improved improved shred… The talent just doubles down on improved shred from before. Why does shred need 2 talents already? Just bake all of it in already, same with “improved shred and swipe???” bake it in. Give us two interesting choices between direct dmg and bleeds.
At this point of the tree, I feel like I am given a very subpar, wet-noodle cat that needs allllll these talents to ACTUALLY do dmg with its spells. In fact, there is VERY few that are actually bleed oriented. - row five: Here you dont even give us a choice, both sudden ambush and taste for blood are direct damage oriented. Why? Taste of blood increases damage per bleed, but in reality it just forces ferals to actually use bleeds. Sudden ambush is actually a pain in the rear to manage, tbh. Its one of the reason why ferals want to tunnel single target. Beserk: relentless… This is boring af… its not even at 100% chance. Which means its horrible to manage.
- Row six: Moment of Clarity: why not just bake it into omen of clarity? why drag it out like that? Why is savage roar even still here, its garbo bad and feral doesnt need another finisher that passively buffs damage. Just bake it in already, ferals rotation is already too complex. Does blizz really think lunar inspiration is at the same level at primal wrath and brutal slash? Dear god… I mean, why isnt PW and BS should be baseline already, idk why they are not yet.
- Row Seven: Pred. Swiftness… just put it in the pvp stuff already. But, generally, WHY do we have this type of row? There is an ENTIRE TREE over to the left for stuff like this, leave the feral tree to damage oriented talents only plz.
- Row eight. Beserk: Jungle stalker. I get what your trying to do with beserk, but the spells that you are providing are lackluster at best. Your providing stealth-level based dmg with ONE stealth when you have clearly built a spec that does basically NOTHING with stealth outside of on the pull. I completely approve having different styles and stuff for beserk, but 1. you have to do something with the baseline beserk, 2. you need to make each of them provide different playstyles. Relentless and jungle stalker are just direct damage buffers. Thats it. Nothing exciting. Beserk Frenzy is nice, however, I would like to see it have a more profound effect on bleeds. Just bake all the tiger’s fury talents into baseline tigers fury please!!! Half of this entire tree is around tigers fury.
- Row Nine: Bloodtalons: headache oriented playstyle. IDK why its still here, it was bad throughout SL. Why cant Feral Frenzy be a third major cd, take away the combo points, and even add tigers fury to it. Why is incarn just energy? You would think its a higher level then beserk, so shouldnt it be a epitome ‘shape’ of beserk? its pretty weak to hold that standard.
- Row Ten: Whats the point of Improved carn and covoke? Thats just a quality of life talent. Shouldnt row 10 be like the strongest and the best spells? Right now, basically everyone is funneled into Circle of Life. Even then its a PASSIVE spell. I mean, it kind of puts the topping on the cake, doesnt it?
- Finally, how the tree is built. It really does not promote ‘player choice’ when it comes to choosing talents. If you look at it, your forced to choose either PW or BS, one side is just full of tigers fury and the other is full of bite talents. But at the very end, circle is on the bite ‘side’.
I mean, what else do you want me to say? Why doesnt blizz just come out and say it. Ferals are to be a direct damage spec that are required to maintain bleeds to do higher direct damage. Thats what i get out of this tree. Passives upon passives upon old, outdated, and subpar talents.
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That doesn’t mean it’s a good effect that people enjoy, just that it’s a strong damage increase and it has very little competition from the rest of feral legendaries.
I agree with a lot of points here. I don’t necessarily think Infected Wounds being a talent is a bad thing, but maybe it should be on the general class tree as part of utility choices.
I want to reiterate that Swarm splitting is very key to how enjoyable it is to play in dungeons right now, but it’s also particularly detrimental in pvp, so that being an upgrade trait instead of part of base Swarm would be ideal. I also think that 20% is a bit weak considering right now it’s 38.2% in the live game, but it’s hard to compare power budget between talents in the new tree.
I know but they could have something that buffs DOTs on single target which doesn’t exclusively restrict you to one target. Or just make the baseline abilities stronger and not require such an enormous 40% amplification to be good.
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