Please Remove Wild Attunement: Why Tying Damage to CC Doesn’t Work

PVP Arenas
1

Just under two weeks ago, we got the following hotfix:

  • “Wild Attunement no longer activates when Cyclone is cast on an immune target”

Whether you want to call it a nerf or a bug fix — I think this is almost certainly how Wild Attunement should have worked this entire time — this change has only clarified for me the most problematic aspect of this playstyle:

I hate having my damage tied to cc.

In the comments of Axtin’s fantastic post on the current state of Feral, I discussed my thoughts about why it’s problematic to have damage tied to cc, and the main issue I see is that overall baseline damage then needs to be tuned around cc.

Let’s assume every spec, played optimally, does 100 units of damage. Whatever the raw numbers or damage profiles are, good balance seems to me like it would be every spec being within a few percentage points of those 100 units of damage — perhaps you tune specs with higher one-shot capabilities to do less sustain, and vice versa — but overall, the vast majority of specs, played optimally, should do roughly the same damage. Now if you add an ability that gives 20 units of damage (I don’t know how to calculate the damage given by Wild Attunement, but it’s obviously significant given that it fires off an ability that’s normally a 45 second cooldown, is a bleed, and generates 5 free combo points), whatever the condition to achieve those 20 extra units of damage is, you’d have to tune down the original baseline 100 units for that spec, otherwise you’d just have a spec doing significantly more damage than the 100 units. In oversimplified terms, to balance this spec, you’d have to make their baseline damage equal something like 100 - (20 * % of typical success at achieving the condition).

That’s what has been done to Feral. Feral can’t just pump out damage like it did in Dragonflight Season 1 — which is fine; the fact that we ignored Cyclone entirely (while partially tied to the many issues with the Druid Class Tree) because we could just PvE and put out endless pressure was problematic in its own right. But Feral received huge nerfs to its bleeds — 18% on both Rip and Rake — and that was then compensated for with Wild Attunement.

Because of Wild Attunement our damage is now all about Cyclones. If we cast a ton of Cyclones successfully, we do a ton of damage. If we cast no Cyclones successfully, we do no damage. Before this hotfix, we had — frankly — degenerate gameplay. Ferals would be purposefully casting Cyclones on totems, into Cloak of Shadows or Divine Protection, or on triple dr’ed targets — or even people already in a Cyclone — to proc Wild Attunement, and that’s just terrible gameplay for everyone involved. It should never be the case that you cast a spell that you know is going to be meaningless and ineffective for its originally designed purpose — like Cyclone for CC — so that you can get a damage buff. Imagine if Hunters just got a free Kill Shot proc for casting Flare so even against teams with no stealth, they’d just fire off Flare on cooldown. It doesn’t make any sense.

But the specific issue with this hotfix is that while it rightfully cuts out this degenerate gameplay, it also significantly reduces the number of Wild Attunement procs we’re getting, which in turn significantly reduces our damage. By “significant” I don’t mean “a lot,” I just mean some non-negligible amount, even if it’s just a few percentage points in the equation.

I didn’t like finishing casts into a Grounding Totem or a Glimpse, but I did it because before this hotfix, it still meant damage, and my damage as a Feral was roughly tuned around the equation above — our baseline damage with arbitrary numbers is 100 - (20 * % of typical success at achieving the condition) — and the condition was just completed Cyclone casts. Changing the condition to successfully cc’ing Cyclone casts reduces the % of typical success at achieving the condition by a significant amount. I do not know what that amount is, nor how you could meaningfully calculate it, but the % almost necessarily goes down, meaning that our baseline damage should have gone up — but it didn’t.

So we are left in a situation where we do less damage because it is harder to proc Wild Attunement, because it’s harder to land a Cyclone than it is just to cast one. Again, I’m fine with cutting out the degenerate gameplay, but the benefit of landing a Cyclone should be that it allows me to do my normal damage more effectively, either because I’m not getting peeled/pressured or because my target is not getting healed.

I just want my normal damage back — not the overpowered Dragonflight Season 1 damage, but not this neutered variation either. I want to be able to Cyclone for CC, not for damage. Frankly, one of the best feelings as a Feral is to get big bleeds rolling on someone and then put out a Cyclone on their healer or their dps partner. It’s hard to do that when our bleeds are nerfed so massively and our pressure comes from already having landed a Cyclone.

Remove Wild Attunement and tune our baseline damage up — preferably through un-nerfs to our bleeds — to be in line with everyone else.

5 Likes
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i qwit my feral cuz of this dumtalent

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good post. legion feral as a version of rogue that traded cloak+blind for animal forms, even without clone, was less irritating to play as and against than this garbage

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Do you think feral would be a better spec strength wise if they reverted this nerf and pruned wild attunement? I’m not sure if it would.

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Imo it is probably better now in hands of a good Feral but overall the gameplay feels dull. To be fair I prefered bleed bot from season 1.

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Cyclone is the best cc in the game. Having high on demmand damage (feral is no longer a bleedbot) and the best cc plus two stuns does that.

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I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “strength” because that seems like a very broad term to me, so apologies for the long-winded response!

From an overall “health of the spec” perspective, as compared to Season 1, I think that the other changes that have come down since then — the very minor tweaks to the class tree (making killer and nurturing instinct 2 points each instead of 3); the introduction of Saber Jaws to enable a big Bite build — are enough to sustain Feral if the bleed nerfs were reverted and Wild Attunement was pruned. And the defensive/survivability benefits detailed below would be healthier too for the spec.

From a DPS perspective, I’m not asking for the PvE bleedbot playstyle of Season 1, so if the Rip/Rake nerfs don’t need to be fully undone to get our baseline damage back in line, then only un-nerf them as much as they need. But the whole point of these talent trees was that we should have options — and of course tier sets and such are going to push us towards some options over others — in my opinion, Feral should basically always have the option of big Bites or big bleeds, and the massive 18% nerfs to our bleeds took the latter option away.

From a defensive perspective, it would allow us to take King of the Jungle permanently, and allow flexibility with the third slot probably to either apply more pressure with Ferocious Wound or have slightly more survivability with Strength of the Wild — though, I think Strength of the Wild, and all Feral PvP talents really, could use a good look, but that’s for a different thread. It would also allow us to just pump against melee trains with a Fistweaver, which might at least cause them some pause while they bash our faces in. Feral survivability is also a topic for a different thread, but I think that part of the issue of Feral’s survivability is that we’re relentlessly trained because we’re forced to play like a caster without any caster tools to get our spells off. Shutting down our one spell shuts down essentially all of our pressure, forces us into caster form where we’re weaker, and basically makes the match 3v2.

“Just juke,” I hear some people say. Sure! I like juking, honestly, and I’m pretty good at it. But now, I can juke a Demon Hunter’s kick and they can just Glimpse, so not only have I spent upwards of 3 seconds out of form, not doing any damage, having my bleeds fall off, but I have nothing to show for it — when I was relying on the damage that would come from it to bring me back up to par with everyone else — but even if they don’t have their kick up any more, they can stop me after Precognition wears off with either of their instant stuns. The same essentially plays out with any Shaman or Rogue. And honestly, that’s normal! I’m not saying they shouldn’t have those tools (though Cloak of Shadows being essentially an immunity is still a head-scratcher). What I am saying is that it shouldn’t be so punishing. The drawback to me not getting a Cyclone off because they used their spell-stopping tool should be that I haven’t CC’d someone on their team and now I either am taking more damage or they’re getting more healing than they or I would if I had landed that CC. The drawback should not be “and now I do subpar damage.”

Imagine if a Warlock got an X% damage done debuff whenever a Shaman broke their Fear with Tremor Totem, or for a Mage when a Priest pre-Death’s their Poly, or if a Hunter just whiffs his Trap…. It’d be weird! It’d be very strange and punishing and would feel pretty bad. Now imagine that they had that X% damage done debuff on permanently and they only got rid of it while their CC was active. That’s even weirder and more punishing! That’s essentially what’s happening to Feral.

Regardless of whether taking away Wild Attunement would change other team’s targeting decision-making when thinking about relentlessly training the Feral, it would allow us to do our full damage without having to rely on casting — and now landing — a spell. As a melee spec, it doesn’t seem like a ridiculous request to me to want to be able to do my normal damage without relying on casting a spell.

I love casting Cyclone. But I hate having to do it for my damage. It’s like having a hobby that becomes your job — it was fun and fulfilling when it wasn’t what you HAD to do.