100% agree with basically all of this. This post is well thought out and well said and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
The only thing I’d have against removing Wild Attunement is that I’ve finally broken myself of the habit of shifting back into cat after a Cyclone cast… I think I’d be happy to pay one of the 6 talent points it costs us for Cyclone to keep that part of it.
On the survivability point: I think that Feral’s survivability isn’t unplayably bad, but it is still pretty dire. And as you point out, it’s a combination of having poor survivability and being completely shut down if we can’t get a Cyclone cast off that really leads to us being trained every match. My issue is just that we don’t have a “f*** off” button. We don’t need an immunity, and bear form shouldn’t be so massively powerful that people have to swap off just because we pre-bear something, but we can pre-bear, trade barkskin and still die through… Thorns doesn’t dissuade, and our one-charge, six-second, three-minute cooldown wall doesn’t really stop people from tunneling us.
We need something, and I know you mention the barkskin leggo as contributing to past problems, but my go-to suggestion has been just that: The Natural Order’s Will from Shadowlands (Barkskin reduces damage taken by an additional 10% and when it starts or ends in bear form, you also gain Ironfur and Frenzied Regen). It’s still a high skill-expression play, it’s nowhere near a get-out-of-jail free card because you still have to have the awareness and foresight to pre-bear, and it’s essentially a 1-minute cooldown. Additionally, I think that it really wasn’t the main contributor to why our healing was oppressively high in Shadowlands; in my opinion, it was Well-Honed Instincts, which if I recall correctly, had its internal cooldown down to like 45 seconds by the end of the expansion, and as you say, Fleshcraft, especially when paired with bear form and Ursine Vigor.
That said, if the Druid Class Tree wasn’t so awful (out of all 13 class trees, it: has the least lateral mobility, has the most dead-end nodes, has the only 3-point node, and is the only tree with completely wasted off-spec nodes, among other issues) we’d be able to pick up things like Ursine Vigor, Feline Swiftness, Well-Honed Instincts, and even things like Protector of the Pack or Nature’s Vigil if they were unnerfed to a point where they’d be remotely viable. That might be enough to boost our survivability to a solid point.
Finally, one big thing that seems to always bug me with Feral’s ebbs and flows is when they shift too much of our damage into Bites. Thinking back, I think I’ve always enjoyed Feral more when our bleeds were more of an emphasis than our Bites. If and when they redistribute damage from Wild Attunement, I would like to see some of our damage shifted back into them and a buff to Adaptive Swarm; I love that ability, even in a cleave setting.
TL;DR (because us Ferals are a wordy bunch):
- Get rid of Wild Attunement (but keep the swap to cat after a successful cast);
- Move Cyclone to a reasonable spot/fix the Class Tree to get rid of wasted nodes and lack of lateral mobility (my more-fleshed-out thoughts on the class tree can be found here: The Druid Class Tree: A Comparative Analysis of Why it Fails and What it Needs) and
- When redistributing damage from Wild Attunement, shift more of it into bleeds and buff Adaptive Swarm.