I’m just wondering how such a historically maligned spec has gotten so many people to main it over the years. What about feral do you enjoy?
ur a tiger shredding ppl, enuff said
6 Likes
You can permenantly shift into animals. It’s cool.
What kid has never wanted to to do this?
6 Likes
-I like melee more than ranged because I hate having to stand still to cast.
-I prefer energy-based specs over GCD-locked ones since I don’t like having to maintain constant high tempo, I much prefer the alternation between periods of high activity and periods of low activity.
-I like having a bit of complexity in the rotation otherwise I get bored. I like having something to manage. This is why I don’t really get along with Outlaw. Managing a couple bleeds with snapshots hits that complexity benchmark for me.
So all those points together my favorite specs in the game are Feral and Subtlety. I like playing both though I main Feral because the class aesthetic is the tie-breaker for me. I’ve enjoyed Night-Elf and Druid culture since WC3 and I don’t feel as strong a connection to the personality of Subtlety.
4 Likes
Hard to put into words. I’ll just say I have the most fun playing feral.
It’s like a rogue and a warrior but I’m a cute cat and that wins any argument.
Vanilla and BC Feral were different animals.
So many dungeon groups saved…pvp was a blast, you were really rewarded for knowing when to bear and when to cat.
Staff of Natural Fury let you shift so cheaply so I would bounce between the two constantly, go bear>abuse charge, go back to cat, throw up bleeds, it was a different sort of fast paced.
Now it’s a rogue with less utility and no toolkit
6 Likes
Eh I wouldn’t use the word phrase historically maligned. More like generally meme-viewed by the general player base (and that isn’t saying much considering it’s the WoW general player base) Most people just parrot what they hear others say so when people make jokes/tell you to switch specs it’s more about what they want, which is usually the higher desired specs of tank, healer, or ranged damage.
I played feral on pservers of bc wotlk and cata and feral just bought me with:
. The most rewarding spec. It has always being a spec that has a high skill ceiling and there was a time when if a feral was played at top lvl it would be just amazing. Their rotation needs you to manage not only your bleeds uptime (rip rake mangle before) but when to cast them since it’s one of the few specs that has “snapshotting”. We have a couple of abilities like tigers fury and savage roar that makes those bleeds be much stronger and our bites also scale from our energy so spamming mindlessly isn’t an option. You have to think whether you can shred or its better to wait and pool energy. A lot of decisions that has a huge impact on our game.
. Mobility. We were once kings of mobility. Once upon a time feral was the spec with most mobility in the game. Now we are slower than rogues.
. Utility. Feral used to bring a raid wide stat buff, a crit buff, an armor penetration buff and bress. Also feral talent tree was shared with guardian so we could handled a couple of hits if tank needed some help.
Now: we lost almost everything. We have mobility but in a short sprint we are just the same as half the melees. Our utility is just druids utility of bress. Balance just brings everything a feral does and it isn’t a melee so you can bring a rogue that has much more utility with their immunities and toolkit. Our damage is lackluster, we depend entirely in borrowed power to make us do competitive damage.
But the rotation is still there (well not exactly since sabertooth exists). I have hopes that sl buffs of lunar inspiration and savage roar make them usable so we get our complex high rewarding rotation back, having to keep rake rip moon fire and savage roar while we bite for direct dps.
2 Likes