Ret has a massive burst aoe damage with a 30 second cooldown with wake of ashes, and talented, activates wings… all on a short 30 second cooldown.
Feral has a 3 minute cooldown for it’s “burst” and something comparable to wake of ashes for feral would be Feral frenzy, but it’s a 45 second cooldown and single target only… Why can’t feral be as cool and strong as ret 
at least shorten ferals cooldowns.
Ret gets to be OP and simultaneously braindead easy because it’s a very popular spec
I know it’s not fair, I love both druid and paladin but man, being dps and playing ret makes life so much easier compared to feral it’s terrible.
So I’m not going to try to convince you that feral is just as strong as ret overall because clearly it’s not. However, this direct comparison you’re trying to do isn’t very useful and frankly could lead to more problems than benefits if Blizzard were to try to create such a mapping. I don’t want feral to become a similar spec as ret.
Feral druid’s primary strength IS the fact that it’s not a CD-laden feast or famine spec. When feral druid had close to a 100% pickrate (if not actually a 100% pickrate) in MDI during DF S1, it didn’t have crazy CDs then either. Its steady, reliable damage was simply higher than what any other spec could put out, burst or otherwise.
By not having a lot of bursty CDs, design wise feral fills the role of carrying the damage for the group when the other specs are in their famine phase. There isn’t much of a drop off for feral when it is in CDs compared to when it’s not, at least relative to the more bursty specs.
While I would certainly welcome some better tuning, I don’t want feral to become yet another live-by-your CDs spec. There are already plenty of specs that fit that criteria. I’d much rather Blizzard just tune the consistent damage from feral such that it can compete over the course of a raid fight or M+ dungeon with the burst specs, rather than turning it into one.
The power of feral frenzy isn’t the damage it deals, it’s being able to build 5 CP quickly and without spending much energy. Getting another bite/ravage after getting some damage out while pooling is the real value of the ability, not the damage it deals. I wouldn’t turn down a buff to it or allow it to hit multiple target’s, but that’s just a nifty little bonus compared to the real benefit of getting the CP and energy.
Yeah, I do not think of FF for damage, but the CP I can get quickly. With how Bloodseeker Vines work, it can actually get a burst of good AOE damage. FB on a target with BSV, hit FF and then FB again.
And the fact it’s the only class left in the game that can still snapshot for dmg. Imagine having 100% uptime on something like a 40 stack agi bonus active and 40 stack agi bonus passive from a spymasters.
Sure, but Blizzard did away with external buffs as part of the snapshot a while ago. Blizzard already saw how much having everything snapshot can create problems.
True but that’s external like the above mentioned trinket. Personal class cd usage still snapshots that was sorta my point on them having longer cd’s. They are also unlike pallies who are builder spenders, ferals are more bank and dump.
Oh got it, I misunderstood what you were saying. Personally I don’t really think that’s much of a concern. If feral had more/longer CDs, Blizzard would just rebalance the spec to keep the floor and ceiling at whatever level they want the spec to be.
That’s another reason why I don’t really like when people suggest to just drop mechanic A from spec B onto spec C. DoT specs by design can’t have the burst of a non-DoT spec. Without redesigning the spec from the ground to be something entirely different, if Blizzard were to add more CDs to feral, those CDs would wind up being anemic OR the rest of the damage profile around those CDs would be just as weak as what burst specs currently deal with. So feral would wind up with all the existing downsides while losing a significant portion of the upside.
You can do the same damage as a 595 ret to a 610 feral even if both have four piece. I know cause my ret alt crushes with just a 2 piece.
Ret you can mess up your rotation plenty of times during a boss fight and still hit a million+ where as the feral if you mess up once its harder to recover.
Plus the range abilities ret has is just a ton of fun to play. I’ll still suffer a feral at heart but man is it fun to jump on a dps class thats all smoothbrains to play sometimes lol
I’d love to see some data to support this idea. Ret is certainly stronger than feral, but I highly doubt if it’s doing the same damage at a 15 item level deficit unless the fights are very short or the feral is being played much worse than the ret.
I’d much rather this as well but, frankly, Blizzard has demonstrated time and again that they are completely incapable of tuning Feral properly.
I mean I can believe it, I’ve seen Rets that are in the 610-619 range that pump real meter DPS in the key groups I’ve been in that are more damage than what I simmed on my 626 Dev Evoker after the fact.
True, but that hasn’t changed regardless which variation of feral druid we’ve had. During most of BFA, Sabertooth basically made Rip a passive ability due to it extending the duration indefinitely, and feral balance was still terrible. I have no confidence that if Blizzard were to give feral 4 more CDs that essentially turned us into a feast or famine burst spec that our tuning would be any better, given their track record. I’d rather keep the spec such that it’s unique and fun for me to play, rather than giving potentially both if tuning is likely going to be terrible either way.
Yeah it could be. There is just a LOT of exaggeration on forums like this with respect to how well X or Y are performing, so I’d like to see some data to back up the claim. I know that I won’t have enough data with just my own runs to insulate my results from differences in skill between myself and the people with whom I am playing.
When ferals become that strong they get nerfed into the ground. Can’t have that!
This has been my experience as well. I run with two ret paladins pretty regularly and they do truly exceptional damage in dungeons. While I can’t specifically address the comparison to Evoker, I can say they are regularly in the 2mil dps range and spike up to as much as 4.5 mil nearly every pull - which definitely makes me wonder what data set Blizzard is looking at, and why this doesn’t appear more robustly in the rankings.
Yeah the thing that makes it tough is this hasn’t been my experience. Now I haven’t PUGed many even remotely high level keys yet due to lack of free time for keys, so take that for what it’s worth. But I have yet to lose out to a ret paladin in a key I’ve run in overall by the end of the run yet, even when I had a lower item level than the ret. It’s very possible I simply outplayed the ret by a wide enough margin to overcome the tuning in each case. That’s why I’d prefer more generalized data sets; unfortunately so few keys are logged publicly (compared to the number of keys run) that it’s hard to have enough data available to account for skill differences and random events.
They need to give feral kitties our range back, so stupid that ret gets to keep it but we lose ours it really makes feral feel much worse than it use to.
It actually feels worse now to play than other melee. I find myself constantly out of range trying to use abilities - don’t have that problem with other melee classes.
Honestly, seriously considering throwing in the towel. Stuck with it as long as I could, but it’s just been a source of constant frustration for me.
Imagine if Tiger’s Fury activated Beserk for 8 seconds.
That would be pretty interesting.