Please consider feral druid changes (M+ feedback)

In Development Ghosts of K'aresh PTR
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Tl;dr - really grateful for the relative competitiveness feral has had this past season, hoping for more of the same next season and in its current state that won’t be the case, please consider changes/buffs/adjustments to improve feral relevancy and overall meta spec/class diversity and subsequently player happiness :smiley:

Hi, as a feral druid 1-trick in M+ I’ve really really enjoyed this past season (S2), and feel like devs have done an awesome job of providing class diversity in the meta.

historically feral has been a relatively underperforming spec, and while boomy is still better than feral this season, feral doing enough damage to be playable and considered by physical comps has been awesome. I’d really love to get to this state for next season and with the current way things are in PTR I don’t think that’s going to be the case.

in my testing on PTR here are some of my observations:

  • feral does close to tank damage outside of cds

  • i could see this being fine if we are offset by strong cd damage, but unfortunately our cd damage is comparable to other classes cd damage

  • I currently do more damage using the s2 tier sets (2pc / 2 pc) over new tier sets

Currently it’s feeling pretty bad and a huge relative drop compared to this season (going from doing competitive damage to doing little damage).

Here are some other thoughts:

  • Currently the tier set is based around ravage, which is already a % proc that competes with resources needed to apply rip (rip or primal wrath is always gonna be our finisher priority when apex & bleeds are the foundation of our damage). for ex when I get ravage procs it’s not a guarantee i’ll be able to use it without compromising rip uptime if I’m getting unlucky with apex procs

  • On top of that the 4 set is based around a % chance proc on what’s already a % chance proc, reducing the relevancy of the 4pc

Here are a bunch of suggestions, I’d love if any or all were considered or implemented:

  • Change / incorporate into either the 2pc or the 4pc to increase chance of an free ravage proc so that we can actually make better use of the 4pc, or really any change that gives us more guarantees on ravage utilization. This is the change that would make our 4pc more relevant, right now it barely gets utilized. (this would help us do more than tank dmg outside of CDs)

  • Remove the % chance for the 2nd ravage (currently seems really buggy and triggers much less than 40% of the time, maybe b/c of internal cooldown but either way feeling bad from an experience standpoint) , plus ravage is already a proc

If the goal is to have tierset utilization outside of cds, then the other option is making changes outside of tierset to help us actually get there given the low proc rate and limited resourcing. Here are some suggestions to help with that:

  • During Tiger’s Fury, increase chance of Apex or ravage procs (or both)
  • Increase proc chance of apex or ravage
  • Rework apex and ravage procs to remove RNG - for ex: Bite energy required for max dam is lowered for each rip finisher use

Also, reposting a bug from feral dreamgrove discord for DOTC tier set:

  • Using Ferocious Bite at the same time as 4p ravage echo causes the bite to deal 90% reduced dam and not trigger rampant ferocity

Thanks for reading and considering, always open to hearing other people’s thoughts too.

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I also think that feral druid should have solar beam.

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I TOTALLY AGREE. Please look into this Blizzard!

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Great points, I’m not as knowledgeable about the intricacies of feral but I love playing the spec and it would be sad to see it useless in keys next season

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  • Just buff apex back to 9% the spec has been feeling bad to play since the patch in df s2 that reduced the proc from 9% to 6%,

  • Rework apex, remove the rng part, bite energy is lowered for each applied rip,

  • Rework apex, have it increase the tick rate/damage of rip until a bite procs (feels bad not have any procs for 30 seconds to 1 30 minutes)

  • every 3 second without having a proc, the next apex bites does X % more dmg and it stacks until you get a proc

  • apex bites are considered as if you have Tigers Fury active. it feels weird not have any apex procs for the enterily duration of Tiger’s Fury. it also looks weird by loosing around 40-30% of bite dmg just from Tiger’s Fury and Taste for blood

  • Change to sabertooth, sabertooh stacks up to X amount of stacks

  • Change the scaling of rampart ferocity, to keep doing the same dmg that is doing rn above 5 targets, but really buff the dmg below 8 targets

  • Let predator reset Tiger’s Fury again or extend the duration,

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Also consider looking at wildstalker, currently for the 2p effect to work and hit +3 targets with vines you need to have either rip or rake on those targets incentivising you to either double rake in opener screwing with bloodtalons or primal wrath before tigers fury otherwise you won’t get all 3 vines to trigger, This sucks really bad and i hate purposefully putting out a weak bleed so the tier set does what it is supposed to do.
More on the Dotc side of things:
I think most people personally hate the 4 seconds internal cooldown for the echoing ravage, it really sucks since realistically you dont get all that many ravages apart from in berserk where you get a lot back to back so this really limits how many echoing ravages you can get. The whole point of druid of the claw is force proccing ravage back to back. The internal cooldown is really messing with that playstyle. It also being a proc on a proc means we are so reliant on rng to do damage outside of cooldowns and you can clearly see that, in pulls without cooldowns on ptr i was doing tank damage.

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Feral Druids energy income feels clunky/punishing for a few reasons.

  1. Tiger’s Fury is more potent (but has less uptime) than before when Feral had Raging Fury extension and Predator resets. Because of this, we want to use the spell as often as possible, and holding it to make use of the energy is less of an option, and sometimes doing so can be difficult anyway due to other energy sources being random. Sometimes you can be spamming spells for 10 seconds and still be capped on energy (though other times you are just waiting around for procs.)

  2. The aforementioned reliance on procs for energy. A large portion of our energy comes from Omen of Clarity (and by extension Moment of Clarity), Frantic Momentum and Apex (via Soul of the Forest). This is particularly bad on small to medium size pulls (like 5 target for example). Due to their random nature, sometimes you’ll be overwriting procs and other times you’ll face droughts where you get none at all. And both of those scenarios feel bad. The first one due to us not being able to properly use all of the procs (especially when factoring in BT and our bleeds falling off), and the latter because the expected energy income just isn’t there. In other words, the highs are too high and the lows are too low.

  3. Sometimes by time we are ready to use Tiger’s Fury, we are forced to hold even longer due to mechanics taking us out of range, inevitably causing more cooldown wastage (either by having to hold until after the move, or going out of range while it’s still up)

Some solutions could be reverting predator/raging fury changes so that tigers fury can have less desyncing issues with berserk in keys, spreading out our procs a bit more uniformly (being buffed by haste is good though), or changing how moment of clarity works to reduce its energy wastage in scenarios where we already have plenty of energy when it procs. (Like it temporarily increasing maximum energy to give time to spend the energy).

Talents don’t interact with each other in a fluid way

Some Feral talents don’t interact with the rest of the kit in an expected way. (or even have negative-synergy). Like Bloodtalons/Lion’s Strength not buffing Primal Wrath initial/rampant ferocity damage, or Saber Jaws not buffing Apex/Convoke bites. In the case of Apex, it also muddies the water for Bloodtalons since it not only consumes Bloodtalons, but also makes it harder to proc it again due to taking up time that would be spent casting builders to proc it. This is especially obvious during berserk where we use Bloodtalons charges really fast anyway. Buffing Bloodtalons to 3 stacks instead of 2 was just a band aid and didn’t fix the actual problem at hand. I think it would be good if Apex bites did not consume Bloodtalons charges (but still buffed by Bloodtalons being up), or if it gave a Bloodtalons stack instead of spending it.

Tier 3 Talents

Adaptive Swarm: It sucks to have to spend 2 points into this to make the spell fun to play around. The two points should just be combined into one. And even with 2 points, the reward for playing them correctly isn’t big enough. In a key it can still be difficult to keep up a large colony of swarms, especially when mobs die particularly fast, causing the swarms to jump early. Its also problematic in single target, where the ally swarms are all jumping into the enemy target at the same time, causing you to lose a lot of bees (since it only stacks to 5). I feel like the spell needs some sort of bouncing protection to avoid this issue, or simply a reduced cooldown to have more control of where they go. It would be nice if swarm had better uptime as a result too, as on live it can be really swingy when you first start stacking it up. Sometimes it takes forever to get going which is annoying. This would make it better for off-healing as well, which would be fun. If you want it to be 2 points still, the 2nd talent can be to make the healing/damage amps apply for allies as well, promoting feral utility instead of just being a druid for mark of the wild.

Frantic Momentum: This talent being 2 points for a low proc chance just feels like a heavy tax to be locking our major cooldowns. I feel like this talent should just be reduced to 1 point as it doesn’t provide anything to the spec, allowing 1 minute convoke to a better option than it is currently, and being a priority damage/boss damage/more frequent burst pick compared to 2 minute convoke being better in AoE with a longer (and stronger) cd burst.

Speaking of Convoke, Skull Bash should be castable during Convoke much like Feral Wild Charge is currently. It sucks to have to interrupt convoke or just get blasted by multiple casts going off because I’m channeling my major cooldown. This isn’t something other specs have to deal with, and having the charge utility during Convoke without Wild Charge would be nice too.

Carnivorous Instinct: This should just get removed. 6/12% extra damage for no reason is just not interesting at all.

Rip and Tear: With Taste For Blood not being based on number of bleeds on the target, this is just a boring talent that doesn’t do much. In fact its basically the same as the t2 talent Dreadful Bleeding, but in the third gate. Should just delete this since it doesn’t have a purpose anymore.