The flip side of that coin is that feral can heal exceptionally well in form, and balance can’t.
Many specs still have great sustained profiles. Namely frost, rogues, havoc.
Not trying to nitpick, but you named 5 specs and I’d disagree with sub and outlaw being sustained damage.
I’d probably add fury and hunter to the list though.
Edit: I was also talking about damage being CD oriented. Well, you can’t clamor for powerful damage cooldowns and keep a damage profile that doesn’t balance itself around powerful cooldowns. I actually want a class that has crappy damage cooldowns is essentially what I’m saying.
Dunno how you can disagree with sub not being sustained damage. Go click on mythic halondrus and sub, click the damage graph and look at it. It’s basically a flat line that sits at like 14k. Barely dips to 12k and barely rises to 16. Outlaw has been largely unpopular for as long as it’s been named outlaw, so I don’t even know what it’s damage profile looks like right now. It’s not important, though.
I mean, it’s infinitely easier for Balance to access Resto Affinity/HotW than it is for Feral so that seems like a wash.
Sub is consistent but revolves around a cooldown. I said:
Edit: I can see the confusion though because I grouped burst and cd reliance together.
Would say that a shift in damage from FB into shred/swipe is probably the biggest thing to do. Buffing shred lets swipe do meaningful damage without taking over the single-target filler role. It would also just be nice to have shred not spend the entire expansion barely clinging to relevance thanks to OOC/snapshotting, with rake’s direct damage somehow being better DPE or even straight up better damage than it with certain legendary/talent setups (not common ones, thankfully, but it’s still pathetic that rake can even compete with shred).
Second would be making berserk actually do something meaningful in AoE, which hopefully the tier shows that blizz realizes this.
It’s definitely telling that DPS off-healing has been relevant a bit recently, and feral hasn’t gotten a piece of it. I do wish it didn’t suck so much to not be balance aff (even as someone who doesn’t play the spec as much and doesn’t bother with moonkin). Might also tip a bit if balance isn’t doing tank-level DPS outside of cooldowns in the future.
I had a thought a while ago about feral having WG baseline (maybe not as strong as current resto affinity version) that can be used with PS procs. I might be biased just because the strong off-healing is my favorite part of feral, but I’d enjoy some sort of group healing like that.
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with pulsar, the opportunity cost of off-healing is much higher than it was without.