“I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.”
They need to make leader of the pack baseline to assist in utility. The small crit buff along with a small heal like the pvp talent would help us in m+ by miles as at least we’d have some utility.
Just try it out blizz, see how it feels.
3 Likes
We need leader of the pack, treeants, and innervate back. This would at least drive down the stigma on feral.
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I’d prefer if they added something better for treants, but without something crazy or some utility I don’t think the stigma will go away 
Maybe summon three copies of yourself instead of treants? At least they’d be cats. Would also be a nice glyph.
3 Likes
Please consider including Shred in that list as Swipe is about to be awkwardly close in efficiency as a single target builder.
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Does the thrash dmg translate into guardian? Or just specifically when in feral spec?
Just feral. Thrash:guardian is actually a separate spell with different values and conditions.
1 Like
This change actually makes them identical in terms of DPE 
Given this, as you said, we can use Swipe as our builder, and while the upfront damage will be lower, this will give us more energy and more Bites in the long run (for single target).
Time to take shred off the action bars.
2 Likes
In case anyone is reading this and taking it literally, it’s pure hyperbole. You won’t have Swipe in raid anyways, and you will still want Shred for single-target during Zerk.
That being said, this is certainly going to feel weird in keys - and I think Shred and Swipe should’ve both been buffed by the same percentage.
1 Like
Honestly, ferals need way more of a bone thrown to them than this…
This is probably the most problematic change. You would also need to buff Shred by close to the same amount to have it be used for anything other than Clearcast procs, Berserk, and to proc Bloodtalons for non Brutal Slash builds.
If I do nothing but spam Shred into a training dummy for one minute in my gear I will do about 40k; in contrast, if I just spam swipe I will get about 37k damage. The does not even take into account the extra combo points you get from a swipe filler.
3 Likes
shhhhhhhhh
hush
You do realise they wont buff shred but probably nerf swipe now.
We need to be very careful with how the devs perceive feral damage. None of them actually play feral, they nerf/buff based on viral you tube videos and random godlike players performing perfect execution in a single encounter.
2 Likes
It also disrupts the equilibrium of all builders. Rake for example holds a nice spot of being good up to around 3 or so targets, and Swipe buffs devalues Rake (which I already think is too weak) and somewhat leans into mindless Swipe spamming. Especially now we use Frenzyband, there’s basically no reason to use Rake on more than 2 target during Berserk as well.
They may as well increase the damage of all builders so that the nice balance of builder choice remains the same (and add Lunar Inspiration in, which is also further devalued in multi-target as Swipe gains value, and even more reason why I’m confused it was left out in these buffs). This (Rake buffs) would help keep Circle viable too as a legendary option.
Plz no lazy aura buff route though, the goal should largely be buffing everything but Bite at this stage. They honestly could just drop that 3% and instead add 10% to Shred/Rake, 5-10% to Rip/4set, 15-20% to LI, 10%~ to Feral Frenzy, and maybe another 5% to Thrash or something.
1 Like
The thing is, how I see it mind you: our single target is fine. Always has been. Even when we choose an AoE build (PW vs BrS).
So even in an AoE setting, our ST was top notch. But our complaints were directly related to our AoE. So they strictly buffed our AoE (as I mentioned, no one will pick BrE over PW in and AoE setting).
Then the other complaint came from: if we’re ST focus, how come we’re getting beat out by other classes that do good AoE and got buffed in ST?
So then they also buffed out ST as well via BrS. But our burst AoE is still suffering in the long run. Swipe buff helps a lot though, so thanks for that. So we’re still going to run a ST build for raids. And our ST builder got buffed but a lot, which helps with those cleave situations.
Now we’re going to have to go back to holding those TF charges for adds and that priority target swaps and burn all 3 BrS charges back to back (use one to proc BT of course).
Kinda how I’m seeing it
What saddens me to no end is that the feral community has been asking for these changes to pve aoe damage for literally years. But they only buff it now…
With these buffs i reckon we’ll be ok in M+ for burst aoe. As it stands now with 4pc and frenzyband im popping off on aoe (if zerk is up). Even out dps’d a monk and mage in overall in a few M+'s last night. Felt really good. 3 pull at the start of a mists i was VERY surprised to see 50k. If they bake the 4pc bonus into a passive or something going foward into the next xpack (because lets be honest, they wont flat out remake our spec) we should be better off.
This is a 3.04% buff in ST and likely a 6% buff in AoE…not sure that bridges the gap between us and most other specs pulling 14k-17k overall.
But thank you for the attention.
thank you for doing the math behind it for me <3
its nice to be looked at in a pve aspect, being the most underperformed class in M+
as a 260 feral i get denied doing +10s sooooo hopefully more ppl see these buffs and give us ferals a chance to perform!
These are pretty massive buffs by Blizzard standards, in the areas that we’ve been calling for. Even if they’re ultimately not enough to put us inline with other classes, let’s acknowledge and appreciate that, and hope that this trend of listening to feedback continues. =)
That said, I am a little concerned that spamming Swipe is going to become the correct answer even in single target scenarios.
Ok Blizzard we need to have a chat about how Feral’s AoE works right now. 99.9% of PvE Ferals are playing Night Fae, and have been the entire expansion. Kyrian got gutted with the nerfs to their covenant legendary. You could literally count the number of people who think Necrolord Feral is good in PvE on your hand. Venthyr Feral never had a chance at life, it was still born. So all of this is Night Fae centric because for all intents and purposes inside of PvE, it’s all that exists.
You’re giving us buffs, mainly focused around AoE abilities plus another 3% to our aura. The abilities you’re buffing, they’re not actually the things that deal the most damage in AoE. In Mythic+ it’s generally Ferocious Bite at the top, then Rip, then Sickle of the Lion (if you’re lucky enough to get a 4 set already). After that trio there’s a dropoff in terms of damage done, and then you start getting things like Rake, Swipe, Primal Wrath and auto attacks. Under that again, you get things like Thrash and Shred.
So of our core AoE abilites, all of them have crap damage. The only thing keeping us above the tank in Mythic+ is Primal Wrath applying Rip and our Apex legendary giving us free Bites in AoE situations.
So let’s have a look at what is being buffed then.
- All damage increased by 3%.
- Primal Wrath damage increased by 10%.
- Brutal Slash damage increased by 20%.
- Swipe damage increased by 15%.
- Thrash damage increased by 20%.
Math cats have ran the numbers, the above works out to be about ~2.7% boost for single target, and averaging out to around 5% on AoE depending on what AoE sim you ran it though. Note that the aura buff is already 29%, and doesn’t effect auto attacks or trinkets, so this 3% is actually a lot less than a 3% and the Slash buff helps the ST numbers a bit. This will put us solidly in the upper quarter for ST, but Feral will still far be below other dps for AoE. To fix that, it’d need more like a 20% buff for AoE. The changes also doesn’t solve any of the lack of utility meaning there’s no reason to bring a Feral, but that’s a different rant entirely.
The 3% aura buff is nice for a needed single target boost, but is nowhere near enough to close the disparity gap in AoE. Personally I hate aura tuning, just because most of the time a spec’s issues aren’t actually solved by the aura tuning and this set of buffs is another example of that. It’s further boosting the already strong abilities (50% of our damage on ST is from Ferocious Bite) and “using up” dps output which could be put into AoE abilities we use on single target instead.
Primal Wrath’s initial hits do a fraction of the damage a Bite does, so the buff is welcome. Could use more of a buff though. Also make it baseline next expansion, PW isn’t a choice, it’s just mandatory.
Brutal Slash for a while now has not actually been used for AoE. It removes our spammable AoE ability that is Swipe, meaning that after the 3 charges are used up we only have Thrash to hit things which is laughable. The vast majority of Slashes are just used as cheap combo points and occasionally a small amount of cleave on mobs that were going to die anyway. The ability needs to be reverted to what it was at the start of Legion, where it hit like a truck and had a longer cooldown. It actually had a use then. I don’t expect Blizzard to change it via hotfixes abruptly though. Either way it’s a small ST buff.
Swipe is in a weird spot. Doesn’t do a lot of damage, but it can’t be buffed by too much or then it overtakes Shred as the single target builder. You could buff Shred and so you can further buff Swipe. I honestly think after the 15% buff it’ll be in a good enough spot.
Thrash. Blizz, do you know how many people come into Dreamgrove and ask questions about how and when to use Trash. They subconsciously refer to Thrash as what it actually is. Trash. You could, no joke, buff Thrash’s dot by 500% and it wouldn’t be overpowered. It’d make Thrash balanced. That’s how bad Feral’s Thrash is right now. It’s an AoE bleed that loses out to our auto attacks in Mythic+. People like to joke about how zero multiplied by any amount is still zero, and this is practically true for Thrash. 20% isn’t anywhere near the amount it needs. 100% buff at the very least.
Now lets talk about the top 3 damage abilities Ferals have in AoE. Ferocious Bite, Rip, and our 4 piece tier set bonus Sickle of the Lion.
Ferocious Bite has so many multipliers that allow it to do some pretty damn big hits and a lot of smaller ones. Tiger’s Fury. Sabretooth. Soul of the Forest. Bloodtalons. Convoke. Apex. Celestial Spirits. Taste for Blood. Carnivorous Instinct. Conflux of Elements. Whatever else I’ve forgotten. They all add up. As a result our ST finisher is the highest damage in a Mythic+ key. Reminder that Feral used to be a dot spec once upon a time. Some like Feral how it is now, others hate it, but it’s way too late to radically change anything during Shadowlands. Honestly I wouldn’t change it either, but flat aura boosts just encourage doubling down on how things currently are for Ferals and their AoE, which is bad. The only non-overhaul change I could think of is allow Apex procs to be for any finisher (Ferocious Bite, Primal Wrath or Savage Roar) but that’s not something that can be done via hotfix.
Rip along with all of Feral’s other dots are just undertuned this expansion. Even Necrolord’s Swarm that slaps a 40% more dot damage multiplier onto them can’t make dots viable in PvE. For Night Fae, Rip ends up being about 10% of our damage overall on single target, and 20% in Mythic+. Rip is definitely something Blizzard needs to look at buffing, as it being applied by Primal Wrath should logically be our top damage in AoE, but it’s currently not.
Sickle of the Lion was a mess on PTR. Didn’t work with anything, didn’t scale with our toolkit, was generally a buggy mess. Hell even snapshotted with Swarm even though Swarm doesn’t snapshot anything (???). So Ferals got to work and tested and bug reported everything we found. Things got fixed and Sickle was great. Keyword being was. It was then target capped so it wasn’t strong on large AoE pulls. Fine. Then you gutted it by 60% to compensate for all the bug fixes. The Ferals in Dreamgrove rioted for a good two weeks. We learnt about the 5 stages of grief as many just threw in the towel and quit over the insanely heavy handed nerf. Feral, for the first time in years had a chance at doing AoE damage and could finally compete. Instead we got beaten into submission with the nerfbat after one out of context Twitch clip of a Feral getting every buff in the game and still losing in overall damage by the end of the run. Blizzard has indirectly acknowledged that they hit us too hard because they gave Sickle a weak buff, and now they’re giving another general AoE buff which still isn’t enough. The best part is that to keep their only use viable (ST damage), Feral needed a full reversion of the 60% tier nerf and a 10% aura tuning on top of that. Our set was pretty low on ST, and comparatively still is. Now other specs have and will be nerfed so that aura number might not need to be as high, but it further shows how far off Blizzard was with their actions.
At any point during the PTR, all of this could have been entirely avoided if Blizzard just talked to the theorycrafters. You have people that do all the math, for free. They could’ve just messaged Guiltyas on Twitter or Discord, had a 60 minute conversation and implement what they had learned from the chat. All of this mess was avoidable. Instead you’ve lost players, lowered morale amongst your playerbase and further harmed the already frustrating negative stereotype Ferals have, which currently is pretty accurate.
None what was said covers the lack of unique utility Feral brings to a group either. I’ve asked in other posts for an existing raid buff to be baked in to one of our abilities, but that whole conversation on raid buffs continues to get crickets from the dev team. Is it even possible to hotfix a 1 minute Stampeding Roar and Innervate into Feral’s toolkit as a quick fix until 10.0 and we get given something proper.
Also can you apply the -70% aura to Feral’s Sunfire already. Should’ve been done during Beta.
I’m not accepting “but muh pvp balance” as an excuse for anything, because you can just nerf the PvP tuning by the mathematically equal percent to keep everything in line there to compensate for PvE buffs.
RIP BUFFME 2020 – 2022. You killed him Blizzard, along with many others.
TLDR; Feral AoE is still crap. Buff Thrash, Buff Rip, Nerf Aura & Auto Attacks if needed to stop ST from getting out of hand.
16 Likes