SOD Feral Runes

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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I have a lot of experience as a feral kitty in both pve and pvp.

these are my thoughts on the SOD runes

firstly, druids are always hybrids and should always be built to play as hybrids. every spec of druid should be healing, shapeshifting, casting spells, dispelling, and everything else.

Mangle: kinda boring, and more of a hassle than anything. it must be reapplied which means its a dps loss for which ever cat has to keep it up. in pvp it just requires an extra gcd and more energy to “set up” which isnt exactly fun

Windfury kitty: again kinda boring. it forces cats to be required for every melee group, but doesnt really add anything to gameplay. in pvp it will be kinda fun to windfury bear attack, but idk not really into it.

resil rune: objectively good in pve and pvp, but doesnt really add anything.

skull bash/savage roar: actively making the class less interesting. going into bear to pummel is a cool aspect of feral. since it shares a cd with bear charge it just makes the easier and less mana intensive. roar: shouldnt change the experience in pve at all really, just like some buff to keep up, in pvp there could maybe be an argument for roar being used in a bear/cat weaving feral, but that seems like it would use a lot of mana.

overall, id have preferred if feral was turned almost completely into a bleed/disease dot build, that shapeshift regularly, if there are going to be massive changes simialr to sod.

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I disagree entirely, as someone who has played feral on the cusp of Blizzcon appearance. Ranked 9 out of top 8 for an invitation. 2930MMR just to put my credentials.

Coming back to WoW for SOD. Feral seems like a decent spot, we are lacking a good slow or MS but damage will be fairly more consistent with mangle helping us output good damage while we rotate to bear form and hit our bash can also cycle a quick mangle/maul before back into cat.

Tigers Fury rumored to give +60 energy will also help fill those voids of downtime after expending all your energy. If powershifting is not in the books at that moment.

Savage roar is meh for Pvp but in Pve makes the feral very competitive. Also a great place to dump your combos if your enemy is about to die in pvp and then you will have it for the next target ideally. Wildstrikes is pretty huge just for extra sustain and kind of RNG, skullbash i am impartial but it is a nice quality of life change. Not sure how often I will personally pick it up. Much rather the 4 second lock out of bear charge which you an easily incorporate into your fight. But I will give skullbash a good try and see if it just feels much more seamless like in Cata

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I hope this entire post is sarcasm

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I’m not trolling, I was just hammered when I wrote that.

Basically feral gets 3 passive buffs that simply increase damage without adding much of anything to game play.

In pve all that changed is: mangle twice per fight and use roar 4 times a fight

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Looks like the Cat form of Mangle is going to be doing 300% weapon damage according to WoWHead’s rune selection.

You’re not gonna be renewing it for the debuff – you’re just gonna be spamming it cause Shred only does 225% and I think Mangle costs less energy too.

Really the problem here, is that Savage Roar sucks to use, and Shred – the more interesting ability to use, probably doesn’t compete with Mangle in terms of damage / CP generation / Extra chance to Crit / Extra Damage / or really anything.

Feral is it’s most fun IMO when you can play like a dagger rogue – only instead of stuns/CC you just have unadulterated damage/raw stats that is really hard to peel with some self healing. Or when your bleeds are so insane that you can put up your dots and then throw on your sun glasses and walk away while they bleed out.

That combined with the PvE ability to brez the tank, jump into bear and live long enough for the tank to get their crap together/wrap up a boss fight.

I do agree that Feral isn’t looking particularly interesting, just for different reasons.
Windfury is amazing… it’s just not very exciting for the feral druid, cause your auto’s are fast already – not hard.

Personally I think ferals/druids in general are kinda incentivized to play in a really annoying way. Prolonging PvP encounters and killing via the war of attrition isn’t fun to watch or play imo.

Personally I kinda want them to lean into the whole “Sneaky predatory cat prowling around looking for prey – and once they’re on you they’re absolutely horrifying cause they just do a ton of damage either from bleeds or just raw shred/FB crits, extremely hard to kite… but they’re vulnerable to fear/hard cc.”

I don’t really care for any PvP that lasts more than 5-10 seconds though, unless it’s because both players are actual gods. I think the worst thing they ever did to this game was slow the PvP down so bad players could experience the PvP duration as god tier players. Long PvP fights are only cool when it’s because both players are actually insane, and if either of them make a single mistake the fight is over.

But yeah… TL;DR – Spamming Mangle / Savage Roar and using FB once in a blue moon isn’t gonna be fun. I’d rather they give Shred an extra 30% crit chance and do more damage or something a bit more engaging. I like positional reqs, cause it forces you to move around, which is more engaging imo. CP generators should hit hard, so I’d rather have to pool energy/position well to get fat crits over spamming Mangle or trying to juggle a bunch of debuffs.

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mangle buffs shred dmg by 30% I think shred will still be best filler

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By resil rune do you mean the one that makes you crit immune in PVE?

The thing that completely removed one of two things that hurts bear druids as PVE tanks? the other being crushing blows

This rune single handedly made druids the best tank choice in classic (based on current released runes)

And you say it didnt really add anything, unless you are speaking from a purely cat druid.