I’m seeing posts about how “Slowing down APM or energy starving us” won’t affect PVE so much because of the Devs ability to number crunch and tune, but it will drastically and negatively affect the viability of Feral in PVP compositions, even more-so because of the INSANE removal of Wild Attunement.
Feral, unlike other melee specs, has one of the slowest ramp up rotations (outside of Incarnation) and relies heavily on weaving in Wild Attunement to sustain pressure. Without being able to use Wild Attunement(pre-TWW), the rotation had already energy starved the spec because of how expensive Ferocious Bites were in conjunction with reapplying bleeds; even more-so now because everyone can seemingly remove bleeds as either an spell, ability, or racial… While I believe hard-casting for Wild Attunement is a clunky design for feral, it had been the single-most promising change into feral that i’ve seen for the spec.
I cannot imagine having much fun playing Feral if I do not have these (mini-game) burst windows from not having Wild Attunement. That PVP Talent, that mini-game, was the CORE part of how your presence as Feral could be felt in a composition. Your ability to succeed with it could determine a match’s outcome. The skill needed to get those successful clones off is what made the rotation fun and meaningful. Not having Feral Frenzy to follow up from having to fake-cast, wait for diminishing returns, making sure your bleeds are renewed, timing your setup for the perfect moment, makes the whole melee-but-having-to-cast clone rotation process feel like it’s NOT FUN OR FRUITFUL for the amount of effort you have to put in. Not considering the fact that every other melee class has kill-in-a-CC potential, so it makes no sense to remove our Wild Attunement.
It takes a lot of SKILL for a Feral druid to be anywhere near as oppressive or disruptive as it’s Rogue counterpart. If these horrible changes stay, people will have to reroll Rogue because why would they continue to play Feral if it’s such bad version of the spec it’s trying to simulate. And don’t tell me it’s not supposed to, Bears imitate Warriors, Feral imitates Rogues, and Moonkin imitates Mages. They’re not supposed to be identical but lets keep them on the same disruptive/burst/competitive viable level, alright?
Please, DO NOT make Feral into a “boring-enough-to-disassociate and mentally-afk” spec by slowing down APM and having us play this “waiting for energy game” like we’re still in vanilla, when all “mana-using” DPS classes DO NOT even run OOM anymore. Besides being a HEALER, resources are as good as decoration in today’s game.
We started with removing GCDs from certain abilities(like major CDs), which was a WIN.
We then reduced GCDs as a whole for all classes, which was a WIN.
Any attempt to slow down or reduce APM is a step backwards and is a LOSS.
We WANT to play a HIGH-OCTANE, HIGH APM specs that hold our attention and we want our classes to perform on the same level as others.
Before you start nerfing specs like Feral that have < 3% pvp popularity, maybe turn your attention to the kind that have been dominating the charts every season since their launch?
Postscript… Why did we NERF the extra range for Feral Catform?.. I don’t want to be inside of my target just to be able to hit them… Is anyone on the Development Team for Feral actually playing Feral?