This post is aimed at addressing the design flaws that ultimately make feral both unfun to play and play against.
A bit of background about myself playing this spec: I have played feral in every single expansion, although I didn’t consider myself a feral main until season 15 or patch 5.4. I’ve done all kinds of PvP on this spec at a top level including world PvP, rated BGs, and rated arenas, with rated arenas being my primary focus.
If you ask feral players what the spec needs right now, most will say it needs survivability buffs, damage buffs, or off-healing buffs which are all understandable. However, the root cause of all the problems feral has right now, in my opinion, is the Wild Attunement honor talent. When this talent was first introduced on PTR, I remember thinking this talent was a cool idea because it encourages casting cyclone (in DF season 1, most ferals were not even talenting into cyclone because it didn’t feel worth it) so it killed the damage-bot playstyle that was widely negatively received.
After playing with Wild Attunement for a few weeks into season 2, the problems this talent created became apparent very quickly. In no particular order:
1.) If you don’t play this talent, it feels very hard to generate pressure
2.) This talent turns cyclone from a crowd-control ability, to a crowd control and damage ability
3.) Promotes cheesy gameplay involving casting cyclone on totems, pets, and even purposely casting cyclone into immunities like divine shield, anti-magic shell, or into another cyclone early just to trigger wild attunement
4.) Feral is ultimately a melee dps spec but is forced into casting almost as much as some wizard specs to win games
5.) Having to stand still and cast cyclone in human form makes feral feel extremely squishy because when casting, we aren’t playing evasive or surviving in bear form or doing much damage if we don’t successfully land the cyclones
6.) Because of how much a feral could potentially control a game by abusing wild attunement, it encourages the other team to have to shift all their attention on the feral because if they don’t, then the game can spiral out of control very quickly if cyclones are not stopped
7.) Wild attunement is too powerful in situations where the other team doesn’t have enough ways to stop the feral from casting
Feral went from not even needing cyclone keybound in DF s1, to relying on cyclone so much that it became the #1 most killed spec in solo shuffle. We need to go back to a middle ground where we are casting cyclone only when it makes sense, such as for crowd-control or cycloning someone at low HP when they use a defensive/offensive cd and so on. There shouldn’t be such a massive damage incentive attached to cyclone because it just creates extremely unfun gameplay on both sides. Feral offensive pressure without wild attunement is laughable right now (outside of incarn at least).
I don’t think feral is as squishy as people say it is. It’s the gameplay that wild attunement forces us into that makes feral feel squishy. The way feral survives is by constantly being evasive with shifting, stunning, rooting melee off you, pre bear forming stuns. Feral needs to be in a place where it can do enough damage just with our actual attacks, not by cycloning.
I ran a poll recently and asked anyone that plays feral to answer if they like or dislike the current playstyle of feral associated with wild attunement (image here) and almost 75% of players (238 votes) that responded said they dislike it. A common point from people that voted liking wild attunement said they like it because “it’s more fun than s1 damage bot feral” which is a very reasonable take. But feral has had perfect middle grounds in previous expansions.
I think another major contributor to ferals not talenting into cyclone in season 1 is simply the placement of cyclone in the talent tree. There is a ridiculous opportunity cost to get cyclone as a feral druid, but wild attunement is so important that we have to just spend the points and pick up cyclone anyways, while losing points on things that help us survive like movement speed or thick hide or mass entangle/typhoon.
In every previous expansion that feral had access to cyclone, cyclones were casted at situational times whenever it made sense which I liked. I also don’t think instant cyclones would be a good thing to return in the current state of the game with how abundant combo points are now. Even if it was instant with a cd, the game has enough instant CC already in my opinion and cyclone being a casted spammable CC is more unique and skillful.
If wild attunement was removed, and to avoid being season 1 DF ferals again, feral just needs to have a better balance between being damage dealers/hybrids/cyclone casters. This balance has already been figured out in previous expansions. I really think shadowlands hit the mark with feral’s overall power budget except for healing being arguably too strong, but the main contributor to that was bear form + fleshcraft and the barkskin legendary which we wouldn’t have now.
If I could make a few changes to feral right now I’d remove wild attunement completely, make cyclone baseline or put it in soothe’s spot as a choice node with soothe, buff adaptive swarm, buff lunar inspiration, buff shred, and buff feral frenzy to compensate for losing wild attunement. Maybe a slight nerf to saber jaws because sometimes bite crits are hitting too hard. I’d also like to see a buff to rip damage but I understand that this would indirectly buff our cleave damage because of primal wrath which could be problematic. Hopefully in the future this could be addressed by making primal wrath apply its own bleed. I know talent tree alterations aren’t something that can just be done at any time like number tuning, but I strongly believe moving cyclone would have 0 negative impact for druids doing other types of content and I just hope to see major improvements to the Druid class tree in the future in general.
Make feral great again <3
Summary
Wild attunement is bad the for game (unfun for the feral and people facing ferals), delete it and compensate with single target damage + incentive to still use cyclone by not having a super high opportunity cost on it in the talent tree