I think you are confused here. I was posting two separate positions. First was the conceptual design of changes I looked at and asked other about, the other is what i think should be changed.
Be it if Rip is removed or not, does not have an impact on if savage is reworked. Savage roar is not practice for combo points because of rip and maim. If rip was removed it would definitely be ok to move it to baseline and keep the combo points but trying to maintain three separate combo point spenders is silly, and really bad class design.
I’m not sure how much you say that as an objective fact. Back during Legion when Jagged Wounds/Savage Roar/Bloodtalons was the meta that was my favorite iteration of Feral and we did have a lot to manage during that time. Including three finishers. (Though I will grant you, Ferocious Bite was barely ever pushed and the finisher slot was over crowded.)
The main thing I’m trying to avoid like the plague is only having one finisher option. Two is fine and if that that other finisher is Savage Roar that’s fine. Though given that Feral is the only spec in the game that still uses snapshotting I’m hesitant to kill Rip simply because Rip is the main ability you’re looking to snapshot. So if you forced me to pick between the two I’d choose Rip to keep over Savage Roar.
Removing Rip for savage roar management is far more exciting and desirable then rip and bite management, and the three of them is just not practical in the current resource generations setting.
You could op for moving the rip dot to rake itself and making saber extend rakes duration and somehow looking at shred/brutal to provide more single target, especially if brutal was single target with a healing reduction and more damage.
In this setting you’d swap claw for brutal, or more directly aoe for single target and this would make feral so much better in terms of stability and skill cap management.
You’re having that problem again where you state something subjective as objective.
Personally I don’t find pressing a buff when it goes into pandemic to be significantly more exciting than pressing a debuff when it goes into pandemic, especially since Rip, unlike Savage Roar, requires you to take snapshotting into account when deciding whether or not to refresh it while Savage Roar the only consideration is the pandemic timer.
You’re chasing me more and more away with some of your ideas. So you want to mindlessly keep uptime on all of your DoTs with just Bite? I’m having difficulty imagining your version of the spec as anything other than a simple opener followed by spamming Shred and Bite for the remainder of the fight. The only thing factoring into your decision making being whether you’re at 5 CP or not. Shred if you’re not, Bite if you are. That sounds like the most boring rotation of all 36 specs in the game. In fact, reading over your list of preferred suggestions, you seem to be advocating for making the class simpler in almost all of them. Whether it be by removing buttons or by making management easier.
You’re making a lot of changes to the effects of abilities but I don’t think you’re really considering the effect it has on the actual act of executing the rotation. Regardless of how much damage or additional effects Rip has on the target, maintaining 100% uptime on it is always the goal. Making that goal easier, even if you make Rip as an ability do more things on its own, makes the class simpler and I don’t think that’s required at this juncture. There’s nothing wrong with modern Feral’s gameplay flow and I’d rather not fix what isn’t broken. Especially if the way we’re going to fix it is by removing Feral’s unique defining trait (snapshotting of bleeds.) If snapshotting is something you only have to worry about in the opener then I would say you are making a worse version of the class. I’m not sure why you’re so in love with this disease idea but you’re not selling me on it.
Part of the issue with feral is the scope of the scaling of gear and its (ie ferals) dependency on gear. This is a consistent feedback issue with the class. Everyone who plays it says “it needs more damage”.
I do not agree, however. I think they are players that are misdiagnosing the issue, namely, that you need more damage to be a threat to people, which is where the scaling comes in.
shifting the rip out is definitely the move. Everyone who plays the spec in pvp agree’s on this. Removing the rips consistent damage will effect feral in a pve situation, so the damage has to be migrated to another ability. While I believe brutal being single target with 25% Mortal strike (possibly having the ms on a pvp talent) and doing twice its current damage is good, that is a limited stack option and with some adjustments (namely, making brutal a slightly larger cd (+5-10 seconds) you’d conserve these stacks for burst phases, or kill phases or spreading the MS out in pvp situations.
The rip damage on rake will just stabilize it in pve. Your trying to maintain the management of rips dot, but it does not need to any anything more then maintaining rake every few seconds. So The end result is
Manage Roar every 35 seconds
Manage Rake every 3-6 seconds depending
Use Priority System for Other abilities + cds.
This makes the class require more management then now, not less. If you want to upscale the management moving rip bleeds to rake with a very short (almost fire-dot related dmg/time) will make the spec require more management of shred/rake combinations on top of the preset Roar> Cds > Bite combo.
I extremely don’t agree. Nor do I see how changing Rip to Roar solves the issue. Damage is damage regardless of what the name of the ability that causes it is. Is the solution you’re proposing here aimed at improving Feral’s ability to secure a kill rather than the ability to continuously pressure the enemy healer with multiple bleeds? That’s putting aside the fact that I absolutely do not want to make sweeping design changes for the sake of PvP players.
You’re going to have to spell that one out for me. Current Feral has you maintaining the same amount of plates but with the added complexity that Rip needs to be properly snapshotted. Roar does not and therefore does not have that additional complexity. In fact I don’t know that I’ve seen you use the word snapshot even once.
I agree with your diagnosis of the problems. I take issue with your prescribed remedy. The Feral you’re proposing is not one I want to play. Which I’m not surprised by. In general I find players and forumites to be significantly better at finding problems than solutions.
You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into your write up. And if your plan for Feral is ever implemented I will more than likely change classes. So I sincerely hope it never is.
Feasibly this could work. However, Blizzard isn’t going to re-work the way the class works right now. Especially because there are MANY more specs that need attention.
Ferals problems in PvP are simple:
they die instantly to any pressure in cat form and are forced to go bear, which makes them do no damage
Berserk is a 3 minute cooldown when it acts like a 1.5 or 2 minute cooldown in terms of power
Basic hotfixes can solve these.
Ferals gain 100% armor in cat form. Still less than Boomy, but improves survivability. A druid should be “weakest” in his caster state. Cat form should improve survivability and this is a simple way to do it.
Berserk changed to a 2 minute cooldown
Ferals can cast healing spells in cat form
Thats all they really need. Sure, getting a buff on bleed damage is optimal, around 10%-15% but they would need to reduce ferocious bite by 5%-8% to compensate.
I feel these are simple and improve feral survivability without breaking anything.
Yeah, this post is more in line with what I see with the general community. The flow for the rotation is fine but their toolkit to respond to outside problems is lacking. Both in PvP and in M+ where Boomy generally has all the tools Feral does except better or less clunky. I don’t see why Boomy needs more armor than Feral and the ability to cast all of their utility spells in their favored form while Feral has to shift out of cat for basically everything besides Soothe.
Players do not like the bleed spec. It is not desired in pvp at all in its current iterations. Everyone says its useless. This has been consistent feedback I have gotten from many upper ranked (glad/hero) players over a near three week period of discussion.
These changes are intended to shift around power slightly from abilities to abilities, and it is mostly a coefficient set of changes (minus roar baseline and rip removed). I dont find this at all in the realm of a major design pass on it.
I also do not agree with your “damage is damage” statement it seems ignorant of the way class design works. Damage is damage but damage that lines up or synergizes with other damage is far better.
Its sort of like fire mage prior to Gpy, and how gyp is able to pair with combust.
These changes were good for the class. Some Burst charges with Ms pairs well with bite, and as a result means securing a kill. moving rip damage to rake is something that is done to have minimal impact on the pve side of things, which punishing the player more for missing roars (because bite damage will have more meaning at that point).
You are absolutely right about this. I looked into feral cat form having armor, or even fear immunity to help them out with these issues. I also looked at if taking guardian affinity, you’d get iron fur and frenzied regen in cat form.
Either way, one thing is clear the fairy swarm needs to come off boomkin and go to feral to balance the distribution of utility between the classes.
I dont mind the concept of more burst and a mortal strike. But realistically, I dont think something major like removing Rip…which has existed since the game came out…is going to happen in the middle of an expansion.
I think the energy should be focused on simple changes that allow feral to be enjoyed. Namely, improving survivability and allowing feral to stay in cat form consistently.
That doesn’t mean shifting shouldn’t be a thing. But if a warrior decides to charge at me, my natural instinct should not be " go bear or i die."
I would love a mortal strike effect. I would love more burst. I just don’t think it is realistic to expect it right now.
+100% armor in cat form
Castable healing spells in cat form
Berserk 2 minutes
I really don’t care what top glad/hero players have to say. As a rule I don’t let other people’s opinions dictate my own.
Then they should find a class that caters to their taste rather than force one that doesn’t to conform.
You don’t find completely removing a major ability to be a major redesign?
You think I’m ignorant and I think you’re too full of yourself. Do we really need to snip at each other like this? I get the impression that you’ve long since dismissed my opinion as one coming from a lowly casual and thus can be safely ignored. It’s not doing a whole lot to engage me in the conversation.
I know how synergistic abilities work and I think you’re looking at my statement in an overly-reductionist way. My point was that I’m not concerned with what the overall damage profile I put out is. My focus is on the sequence of actions I take to make that profile happen. I do not like the rotation for the new version of Feral that you’re proposing.
Look you’re obviously in love with your own idea and don’t give a crap what I have to say about it anyway so I think I’m done with this conversation. I have better things to do with my time than get looked down on by an armchair developer.
This is why enabling Iron fur and frenzied regen in cat form is a good move for feral because it gives it some limited ability to stay offensive while in cat form.
I think bear should be something that would be done in the situation of “I have nothing left”. That being said. I do think that cat form and bear should share stacks from regen stacks (so you cant use it in cat, then go bear).
This sort of synergy between the two form is really good, unlike feral/boomkin combo’s.
Actually, changing Brutal slash from 5 to 1 target, and deal more damage would be really easy. The mortal strike is something else.
As designers it is part of our job to take the opinions of people. There are entire jobs (like UX designers)
That normally is acceptable approach. That is however, not the situation here. In fact, almost all of these people who said “bleeds are trash” also advocated for the old “bleed heavy, stealth” gameplay.
No. I consider it minor adjustments.
No.
Feral has some slight energy issues. Using roar every 36 seconds is less then rip spam, so the impact is more potential output then what rip can give (since you will be casting bite more). Feral has gone in the right direction shifting off large amounts of bleed dependencies to the more burst oriented gameplay. Rip had its chance, we need to not stick to it like we have arcane missiles over the years. They are major failures in the game.
It is a really good idea to go this way because feral has never really sustained a solid position in pve or pvp meta.
This whole argument is silly. Blizzard has resisted making changes to Feral spec for years, even when it really was meme-worthy. I doubt they’re going to go back to the drawing board now when we’re in a relatively good spot.
I’m terrified to see what you consider to be a major adjustment then.
You’re having that problem again where you phrase something subjective as objective. My favorite iteration of the spec was the early Legion Savage Roar/Jagged Wounds/Bloodtalons era. Try adding an “I think…” or “the players I interviewed feel that…”
I disagree. As far as I’m concerned, you’re only having energy issues if it is impossible to maintain your bleeds with the amount of energy regen you have. I find that most energy complaints come from people who are not good at energy pooling and energy management are convinced it’s a problem because they can’t constantly spam on the GCD.
Except in Antorus where it was a top spec? I’d even argue that Feral is in a solid position in PvE right now. It’s hardly the worst performing melee spec out there in terms of damage but suffers from having poor utility in a highly contested melee environment. Its poor meta representation doesn’t have anything to do with its damage profile and everything to do with the fact that it does not bring valuable utility to the group compared to other specs that compete for its slot.
To be frank, I don’t believe you as every single concern I’ve brought up you dismiss as being factually incorrect. I’d like to hear you just once hear any of my complaints and not dismiss it out of hand because I’m not one of the gladiators you interviewed.
The tit for tat argument isn’t necessary, gentlemen. Please let’s keep things civil and productive. You can disagree without name calling.
I think we all agree feral needs more survivability. 100% armor in cat form is simple, effective, and helps us in melee. We don’t need help from magic users due to our escape mechanics. Having Guardian affinity give us frenzied regen in cat form would be solid. Ironfur is more complicated because its based off rage, and I’m not sure anyone would use energy on it.
I think most agree the playstyle isn’t horrendous. Blood Talons might be clunky but it can still work.
The most basic quality of life is allowing us to cast heals in cat form. Cyclone would be the cherry on top.
We would all enjoy a buff to bleed damage.
I feel we all agree Berserk is terrible as a 3 minute cooldown. I see two ways to make it better. Either have a finisher refund 3 combo points, or change it to a 2 minute cooldown. I won’t speak for everyone, but I feel that either option would be universally accepted.
We should have Stampeding Roar as a feral only ability. Boomies get Typhoon, we should have Stampeding Roar.
TL:DR
Cat form gives 100% armor bonus.
Heals and Cyclone castable in cat form.
Berserk refunds 3 combo points per finisher OR is reduced to a 2 minute cooldown.
Guardian Affinity allows Frenzied Regeneration to be castable in cat form.
Stampeding Roar is Feral specific.
Nice-to-haves:
Bleed damage increased. Even a 5% buff is acceptable IMO.
Savage Roar gets an AoE Horrify (rooted for M+ purposes)
PvP talent that changes Brutal Slash/Swipe to single target and adds a Mortal Strike effect.
You’re right. I let myself get too emotionally invested and let that manifest in ugly ways in my responses. So for my own part, I’ll apologize for my hostile tone and the way I characterized Fallingleaf in my responses, and I will attempt to be more mindful for the remainder of this discussion. Though I do still stand by the content of what I wrote.
This one I think is one I want to zero-in on. Balance has the benefit of being able to cast basically everything without leaving form while Feral has extremely select spells it can do the same with. I think it would be helpful to bring up Predatory Swiftness in relation to this. For instance I don’t think that it’s actually a huge deal to get heals in cat form since we can already use PS on Regrowth and all of our other heals come from Resto Affinity. But Cyclone, Hibernate, and Rebirth should absolutely be on Feline Adept. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be. Rebirth in particular Feral suffers compared to Balance because it’s a strictly worse version of the spell. Both specs have the same cast time on it and don’t require any resources other than time, but for Feral it costs an extra GCD because they need to shift back.
I don’t think that buffing ferals bleed damage is needed. I think potentially reworking it so it feels more beneficial and has more interaction could be merited. For example, at current they are very long, weaker bleeds. This may be something to do with the restealth mechanics, but if that is infact the case simply bringing back fairy fire and anti-stealth mechanics could be a solution.
bleeds would have a much more interesting impact if for example the entire concept was redone. For example:
While berserk is active, Your feral activities apply a stacking damage over time effect dealing X % of damage over 3 seconds. Then potentially moving that to a lower cd. These dots should be insanely big and should enact a combust like mechanic for feral, but with a short damage over time (less then 6 seconds).
it must be mentioned that feral should get anti-stealth mechanics on fiery fire returned to help keep that anti-stealth ish bleed advantage. This could be done with a pvp talent “after you rake or bite you apply fiery fire to the target, preventing stealth for 8 seconds”. and making it physical effect which cannot be dispelled by normal means (keeping the “anti-escape” advantage feral has on rogue).
A few ideas are very interesting, and I agree that the whole must be redesigned
But the stupid bz will not adopt
After all, now their group of designers seems to only play DPS that doesn’t require a brain
It is reasonable to suspect that they have never played Feral at all.
The spec as it is is good. Adding complexity to a game like wow is not good for it. I know a lot of people will not understand (and accordingly disagree) but complexity in games is not a good thing (and often they confuse it with complexity being the only “option” for choice, and its not).
Feral does not need more complexity, or more “Brain power” these sorts of things have happened to other specializations (like demo) and resulted in changes like Hand of guldan being placed on a cast time, which ultimately made the specialization lose its fluidity and feel bad.
Feral needs alternations. Ones that will make up for some weaknesses it has, and compared to other specializations (like balance) are many.
That being said, they are simple changes that will help “plug holes” which will ultimately push the class at being better.
I think it’s something better in moderation. I don’t think we should be chasing simplicity in all of the specs as a goal. There should be more complicated options for people who like having more things to worry about during gameplay. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “complexity = bad.” At the extreme case, that would mean the ideal class would just spam the same button on the GCD for the whole fight and that’s obviously not fun at all.
I’m comfortable with the level of complexity and interconnectivty in the Feral spec right now. That’s one of the reasons I play it and why I’m hesitant to get on board with reducing that complexity. Since there’s no other specs that offer that gameplay experience that I like, doing that to Feral would leave me homeless.
I think that’s a Balance problem, not a Feral problem. Balance is overperforming compared to all 36 specs, not just Feral. For Feral’s case I think the only weaknesses it has are in terms of utility, especially compared to other melee specs. It doesn’t offer the same level of “must have” unique utility that other melees bring and what utility it does bring are made somewhat clunky by the way they interact with cat form. I’d sooner look there at improving Feral than I would look at their damage profile.